At the macro scale, I'm afraid the situations are quite a bit more similar than you realize.
Both involve Debian developers believing that their way is more "elegant" (an awfully
subjective term) and patching upstream with little regard for the chance that upstream
understands the code quite a bit better than they do, and little motivation to push those
changes back upstream.
If it was for additional functionality, then I could understand. But elegance?? What an
awful reason to diverge!