Seen on Linux Weekly News.
Ext4 maintainer Ted Ts’o has responded with a rare (for the kernel community) admission that technical concerns are not the sole driver of feature-merging decisions:
It’s something I do worry about; and I do share your concern. At the same time, the reality is that we are a little like the Old Dutch Masters, who had take into account the preference of their patrons (i.e., in our case, those who pay our paychecks :-).
One of those rare moments when art, commerce, and engineering collide to produce comedy.
Dutch masters