As an observer without personal experience with any of this from a technical perspective, I can only go by instinct and feeling, my general sense of what, from what I DO see in the world as possibly relating here. I was rather personally stunned, then, to find that perfectly summarized in an earlier post by cytg111, who often seems to think along the lines I do:
"So Linus comes to terms with his mild Aspergers and discovers he has been an ass all these years... and in the wake of this personal growth he tries to remedy some of what he has done.
And this is a problem. Ok."
It seems to me then, that in order to have any objective sense of how to properly evaluate this issue, one would need to know something about whether the idea that only the best code should be included, (this 'technical excellence thingi' being the primary issue,) can actually be objectively evaluated. Can the 'best code' actually be easily differentiated from inferior code, by most coders, or is it, like most things, evaluated on the basis of assumptions that may not be conscious, the condition that causes bigotry. Not knowing what good code or bad code would look like and having never mastered any proficiency myself in that area, I don't feel qualified to evaluate who holds the objective high ground.
What I do think I see is the usual conservative thinkers, the reason blind, in other words, seem generally to be coming down on the notion this new direction in Linux is a threat. Since the conservative brain is magnetize by fear and thus magnifies it, the sky is falling of their prior, to their minds, God given privilege, I do have to say it raises my suspicions we are seeing just another of their more global catastrophic hallucinations.