Unless you are going to provide examples then I am going to assume that " kernel-politics" refers to things like rejecting "drivers" that can only used with a closed source userspace blob. In those cases the reasons have technical merit - how are the kernel developers supposed to maintain an effectively proprietary API without any idea how it is being used.

No, I'm talking about cases of not liking the way of doing things, e.g. how we ended up with CFS which was a watered-down reimplementation. (ReiserFSv4 is another example of code that met the technical bar and was rejected for purely non-technical reasons, as much as few would disagree with that).