I think one of the Dilbert books had this concept. Make one bullet point ridiculous so your boss can have some input and ask you to remove the “Be involved in a land war in Asia” step in your ten point plan.

This is the first I'm hearing of the "take out the duck" concept. I've run software development teams for quite some time now and I have zero problem taking patches that are perfect without nitpicking them.

What the hell is wrong with people?

People have insecurities and egos. Sometimes you come across someone who need to feel useful, or need to feel important, or have a need to assert their power. Or that simply don't trust you, and assumes that if they don't see a problem, something is lurking under the surface.

With a lot of people you will never need this. But especially in larger projects where any number of people might latch on and review submissions, the chances for someone to find something to complain about goes up rapidly.

And when one person has found something to complain about, all kinds of other social dysfunction quickly becomes an issue too.

We’re taking barely-evolved apes whose brains are made for running down antelope and picking bugs out of each other’s hair, and putting them in charge of incredibly complex machines that have only existed for a short time. There are bound to be some problems.

It's something that emerges in big open source projects. Not really related to software development teams that all answer to the same boss.

It's by far not limited to only open source projects. There are many situations where some fault, no matter how small or irrelevant, has to be found in order to sate the ego of the person doing the review or consideration of a problem or piece of work.

I don't think it's limited to open source project either. But open source projects are unusual in that often even when commit rights etc. are controlled, being able to opine on submitted patches is open, and a way of building social status within the project. And while that often works well, it also does attract people who may even mean well, but will be overly critical because it's their way of feeling they're contributing.

In most corporate projects, odds are you're dealing with a much smaller pool of reviewers.

Did you actually read the thread and conclude it to be unreasonable gatekeeping, or are you assuming that it was?

Claiming that there is no problem is in some ways better than gatekeeping and in some ways worse. But you're right, I should not have called this gatekeeping, since the motivations are muddled.