"despite Oracle's talk of 'donation', a lengthy process precedes the ASF's acceptance of candidates"

As with all of their projects.

With a project of this size, scope, and adoption, I'd imagine the "acceptance" will be somewhat rubber stamped, and the process will focus on setting up the proper ASF development environment, review of existing code, etc.

I think a lot of people are looking for drama where none exists; ASF is just following the same procedures that EVERY project would be forced to go through.

With all the active OOo developers having created The Document Foundation and producing a new, active project that almost every Linux distro is now supporting, donating it to another organisation is unproductive and poses a threat of dividing the community.

I think that it's too late to really damage LibreOffice though. They have got a lot of support so far.