Linux as a whole is controlled opposition. It's the same treadmill of pushing everyone to update to slower buggier less featureful & more user hostile versions, and decrying old working programs as insecure and incompatible.

By making software insecure and buggy devs have an excuse to ship endless patches and mess with users however they want, devs incompetence and hostility is blamed on users for not updating fast enough when they made the problem in the first place.

Your clickbait title doesn't match up with what you're saying.

> So why fool around pretending to maintain it? All they do is merge drivers.

Why aren't they maintaining it? All they're doing is maintaining it!

Who is this “more interested party” you speak of? Hypothetical entities cannot maintain real software. Are you nominating any specific people to do work for you?

Does the license preclude you from forking it?