First, it’s reeaallllyyyy expensive to invest enough in an open source project that you have a reasonable chance of steering it.

Second, even if you do the first, the whole thing gets screwed up again when you start trying to introduce vendor code into the mix. Generally, no one upstream gives a crap that you have super compelling business reasons to compromise on code quality (or even trivial things like how code is committed: tarballs vs good git hygiene), and vendors sometimes compromise a lot.

So it’s not surprising that sometimes groups choose to do the expedient thing to get something to market instead of doing things “the right way.” In a lot of respects, the original Android did this with Linux.

Competition is good.