If the fork is closer to the final result that most people want, it's a no-brainer that developers, maintainers and the community will follow. There's no incentive to stay behind.

It's worth studying the case of OpenOffice.org and MySQL. Both of these weren't satisfactory to the community for <reasons>, so the community forked them and did all the high-demand feature implementation on the fork. Now the original projects that were forked from are near-ghost towns.

So someone implements all the features that a massive number of people want, people use it, but then you think there will be no interest in maintaining it?

Sorry, I don't buy that.

Like Mint failed to fork Ubuntu? Or Ubuntu failed to fork Debian? Or LibreOffice failed to fork OpenOffice? MariaDB MySQL?