[MfA]

How can it be that multiple major distributions maintain and update patch sets for projects for years, without real alternatives being in the kernel, yet they are not considered worthy of being included?

Majorly :

DM-RAID45 ... MD-RAID is a poor alternative, someone is attempting to "integrate" the MD-RAID code inside DM-RAID45 to seduce maintainers to include it but frankly the original DM-RAID45 code is superior and cleaner. They say it should be integrated with MD-RAID because it's time tested, when DM-RAID45 has been in production use for years by Redhat (and multiple other distributions among which Ubuntu and Suse include it in their own kernels).

AUFS2 ... the VFS maintainer refuses to allow it in mainline because it exports VFS internals, while he thinks it should be an integral part of VFS (personally I think putting it in mainline and using it to test VFS functionality as it's put in would be the best way to do that, but who am I). As an alternative he proposes union mounts, which only covers a small part of the use cases of current union filesystems (so union mounts will likely be completely fucking ignored, with distributions plugging away keeping it up to date on their own). Proposes as in "they might get written" even, they don't exist.

When 10's of % of linux users use these things in production for years it should be in mainline ... fucking tossers.

Now this wouldn't be so bad, if my distribution of choice (Debian) didn't have a raging hard on for the political views of mainline kernel maintainers ... so they refuse to support these in Debian too ... ugh, I guess I'll have to switch to Ubuntu ... ICK.