That's just the problem -- they do massively more maintenance than any other software project ever to exist. They waste nearly all of their effort doing the fu

That's just the problem -- they do massively more maintenance than any other software project ever to exist. They waste nearly all of their effort doing the fussiest of tasks. The root issue is the pointless 'version' freezes -- they end up forking every single upstream project, being careful to never backport features (only 'bugfixes', which are never really so when isolated from context), and aim for a zealous consistency in the wholesale removal of any features which conflict with their ideology. I used to get pissed off when the Debian people quoted astronomical figures about how many LoC are 'in Debian', but I got over it -- they really do wear the hair shirt.