> By mid 2020 they posted some screen shots and some graphs showing that they slightly increasesed the speed of map generation.

Fun fact: Map generation was significantly faster before alpha 23. With alpha 23 map generation got reworked to be more procedural, which decreased its generation time, but enabled features like choosing between different biomes per map or the nomad game mode on all random maps.

With the benefit of hindsight, this sounds more like personal drama than a real fork. I'm not super familiar with 0AD beyond playing sometimes, dunno what their org structure is like or anything, but this doesn't look like there was ever really a threat to 0AD.

Again, benefit of hindsight, but 0AD's releases have always been pretty slow, and it doesn't look like this was really out of the ordinary?

It's hard to have good faith on the part of the forkers when it sounds like they took issue with how closed/"iron fisted" the development of 0AD was, and then ... made a fully private fork with 3 people?