Forking code essentially gives you the ability to take everything, and then move it in your own new direction. You leave behind only the parts you thought were "bad" or unprofessional or whatever.
Yes it is. Saying you can just fork it is like saying you can just move yourself and all your family and friends to another country.
You might be able to move yourself but moving any significant amount of developers is in practise impossible.
So it's better to force that significant amount of developers to do your bidding? That sounds just a just a weee bit unreasonable, IMHO.
You're basically saying that you want the fruits of Linus's labor without Linus there to do it?
Perhaps you're saying that you can't take the community with you? That doesn't seem like a reasonable expectation. You can fork, and you can continue to pull from upstream, but you can't force people to use it.