As far as I'm aware, there was no real drama, just Maintainers Having Lives. There was actually some progress being made in the intervening time on the timescal

As far as I'm aware, there was no real drama, just Maintainers Having Lives. There was actually some progress being made in the intervening time on the timescale of months, it just never made it into a release—some distros actually took to shipping HEAD iirc.