it might have helped if he hadn't named it after himself. though that wasn't without precedent; xiafs was also named after its author, and of course there are lots of other examples that aren't failsystems (linux, the boehm–demers–weiser garbage collector, the stl by stepanov and lee, and of course every software project named something like ZEUS or THOR)
the default is for free software to die if nobody works on it, and though murdererfs did have some users, it evidently didn't have enough enthusiastic users for them to take up the mantle
pretty similar to what's happened with firefox and chromium; the hypothetically less evil forks like palemoon keep dying off from failure to recruit new talent
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/11sv7gc/linux_kernel...
In any case they didn't remove it because of the murder.
Some development and maintenance has happened after Hans Reiser's conviction, such as enabling ReiserFS to use more than one core.
However, some problems like y2038-compatibility or 1 second date resolution are not even easy to fix without changing the on-disk format. It's a right pain, y2038 in particular. And ReiserFS doesn't actually have a lot of usage, partly due to this and other problems, so why bother going through a difficult and painful migration?
It's slated for removal now due to the y2038 issue, but even with that the removal of ReiserFS is conditioned on "no one really objects and/or brings a good use case to front", similar to the Itanium removal.
It's more than likely that ReiserFS would have been in the same state if Hans Reiser has died in a sudden accident before he killed his wife.
It was like WinFS in Microsoft land. The filesystem would be the database etc.
(By the way never put an image of a reiser filesystem on a mounted reiser disk and then run fsck. Goodbye, all files.)