I don't have anything against people going their own way but having been on both ends of this kind of rumble in open source my resounding opinion is that you literally cannot please the aggrieved side.

It's a mixture of many things — some people are reasonable and just want sensible change, others are dangerous neurotics who need to go outside; both can end up, deliberately or not, using it as blackmail for control — but the moment the ball gets rolling it's pretty much impossible to stop.

I'd bail if a BDFL was an avowed Nazi but the bar for some just seems to be ridiculously low to the point where it's hard to imagine any (offline) social aptitude.

I'm not sure what gave me the impression but even from skimming the nix discourse the community's emergent personality did seem a bit snowflake-ish.

I've heard people make a kind of reverse-conway argument about Rust attracting (auth-) leftists, perhaps for another time...