Hardware manufacturers are not to be trusted with drivers or firmware

But I was talking about reverse engineered stuff. In my experience, with the reverse engineered stuff you can hardly get better than the binary stuff it was based on. You can only get as good as the reverse engineered stuff and add a few more bugs. So you end up worse.
The problem with reverse engineered stuff is, that you don't understand what lots of the code actually does. So it's very hard to spot bugs that were in the binary blob and fix them in your open code.

Of course, there are always a few exceptions to this rule. For example some BCM4311 flavours, which work better with b43 than with the native windows driver.