I respect your position but I disagree. Projects shying away from criticism in the name of inclusiveness has gone hand in hand with a drop in quality, not just in terms of unwise rewrites but in terms of plain old bad/buggy code - which should not be surprising.
> You are also misinterpreting the behavior of Mr. Torvalds and confusing things.
My point is that Torvalds - historically - used language on the level of "incompetent vandals" freely where appropriate. In a serious software project people are, and should be, willing to state those kind of views very clearly and directly.
> The kernel developers have actually been some of the most adamant about rewriting major parts of the kernel and breaking internal APIs over and over again (not syscalls)
They have; at the same time they've been adamant about the need to avoid regressions, both in terms of maintaining external interfaces and in not ripping things out before a replacement offers feature parity and there's a reasonable migration plan in place. The bottom line is that they caused nowhere near the level of user-facing breakage that the systemd/gnome folks have, and that speaks to higher standards and better judgement.
I'm making a humble request, please do not bring this attitude in open source projects. Really I mean it. It's not helpful and it only makes people angry. You are also misinterpreting the behavior of Mr. Torvalds and confusing things. The kernel developers have actually been some of the most adamant about rewriting major parts of the kernel and breaking internal APIs over and over again (not syscalls) because it's known that the only way to thoroughly improve on the code is to aggressively iterate on it like this. This is actually a major strength of open source: anyone who wants to try to rewrite something can pick up the code and just do it. If it's bad then you throw it away and forget about. If it's good then you keep it. This is precisely how the "high standard" even gets maintained.