Because Zed is saying, "I'll write these patches if..."

It seems to me he's justified in not wanting to waste his time writing patches that wouldn't be accepted anyways.

Uh, what if every would-be open source contributor wrote a grandstanding blog post promising only to submit patches if the maintainer(s) publicly eat crow for an offhand remark they made ... :)

Zed is a gifted hacker of software systems, but I don't really think he's all that good dealing with other mammals.

Is it necessary to use character attacks for what should be a technical discussion on the project management of the python base?

not intended as a character attack at all... any more than Zed's was an attack on Guido's character.

I met Zed in real life. I can assure you that he's really good at dealing with people offline.

I'm sure he's a nice guy -- he actually seems like the kind of person I'd be friends with -- I just think it's appropriate to sort of call him out on the grandiose blog posts :)

I'm all for it to the extent that Zed is building his personal brand and (in essence) being a self-promoter. If he really feels self-righteous about it, then that's a bit worrisome.

Zed vs Guido is exactly the sort of David vs Goliath story that makes for entertaining reading...

That sounded somewhat sinister.

"It seems to me he's justified in not wanting to waste his time writing patches that wouldn't be accepted anyways."

He is free to provide packages that replace core python libraries. The fact he doesn't want to do so and would only give his contributions if they are included in the standard Python libraries is childish, at best.