Credit where credit is due

"""
That's not entirely true.... they attempted to fix this problem several weeks ago by cherry picking proposed patches from Ted before the merge into mainline. But the cherry pick doesn't have appeared to work.
"""

Well, Ted has clearly pointed to the patches he thinks are the best work-around (for at least sparing files which already exist) he has. I started to say "safer" instead of "safe" in my post, but decided to give Ted's patches the benefit of any doubt. Apparently, they are not such an effective work-around, and the Ext4 guys need to come up with something better that does not eat data. Ext4 has about zero chance of becoming the default for any distro except Fedora until they do.

BTW, I hope you don't mind that I'm starting to quote you as an example of how threatened advocates of some distros feel about other distros which they perceive as being more successful. You're the most illustrative example of the phenomenon of which I am aware. (Though I'll stop short of thanking you for providing such a clear example.)