I think it's quite important to have a good relation with upstream developers. You don't want to get into the situation that Manjaro got in with Arch Linux.
That the team was(still is?, not sure) rather incompetent didn't help things for sure, but certainly didn't cause the rift.
Because it puts more work onto the maintainers of Arch having to deal with the issues by a distro that people claim is "basically Arch".