I was with you until here. T'so is quoted as writing that btrfs has a lot of the same design ideas of ReiserFS, and that he supports btrfs as the way forward (he particularly disliked Hans and Namesys, though): http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/8/1/217
Some distros moved to ReiserFS by default, too.
Somehow I've never found the time to properly try it out, but I never really got the impression from others that used it that it sucks. I might be wrong, though.
When I was using reiserfs years ago, it ate all my data (/home unraveled). I like the features, and it was nice and fast for the time but I've held a grudge against it for years as a result. Looking at dumps of the on disk data structures showed massive corruption.
At work, we used it for a long time in a project where tail-packing is a huge win (many many small files). Never had any problems there.
So, it doesn't really suck I just had a bad experience.
SuSE, who later realized it was a mistake and moved back to ext3?