That seems pretty reasonable though. If these are the official channels for a given project, then it's up to the project what they want to do with them, not the ops of the network they happen to be hosted on. If Gentoo or whoever want to move their official channel from one network to another, then that's entirely their right to do so, and it makes sense to close down the previous location and leave a link to the new one to prevent confusing people and fracturing the community.

If you want to stay on FreeNode, you can create as many unofficial channels to talk about Gentoo as you want, and you're free to try to recruit users to it. But taking over what had been the official channel, but which is now officially deprecated by the sponsoring project in question, is unreasonable. It's about trust.

The single-# channels were official channels (or grandfathered channels from before "official channel" policy).

That meant that they weren't random chat channels, they were linked with specific organization that handled them (this was done to prevent name hijacking... which is what rasengan just did)

They took over a bunch of channels just for having the word "libera" in the topic. The actual criteria are something more than that, because there are some channels that had it in their topic but didn't get taken over. But that's approximately what happened.

also, a community spread across two channels is more fractured than a community on one. Forcing users out of the old one is a good thing.