Forced? I thought he have withdrawn voluntarily and then during the Craig Wright controversy Wladimir took one good look at https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commits?author=gavinandre... and said, you know what, Gavin is barely committing any more, let's not just have that access lingering around.

> left as lead developer by Satoshi Nakomoto

No he wasn't, he granted himself that title. Then largely left on his own in ~2013 to focus on the (now discredited and defunct) "Bitcoin Foundation" that he created.

The people developing the Bitcoin project have been pretty stable since 2011.

There is this lovely time coded git-blame chart that was put up last year: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1337008.0

People like Mike Hearn were always outsiders to the project, and have spent a lot of time doing this like arguing for blacklisting, blocking tor, and other things that most contributors think of as strongly at odds with the principles of the project.

Forced out by who? He stopped contributing on its own for a long, long time prior to losing his commit access (due to fears of his computer getting hacked, in addition to him not actually using that commit access).

He's still welcome to contribute (hundreds of people contribute to Core, only 3 of them has commit access), but it doesn't look like he's interested in that.