See, NOW it makes sense...

You're assuming wakelocks are the best solution to the problem. They may be the solution that Google came up with, but just because Google came up with it doesn't mean it's the best. And the kernel developers who reviewed the wakelock patches appear to disagree that it's the best solution.

So why didn't Google initiate discussion of advanced mobile power management techniques during the initial development of Android in 2007/2008, when everyone could come together and agree on a good design *before* you started shipping millions of products?

Of course if you have enough engineers you can forward-port until the cows come home, but that's not a great use of engineering talent...

On one side this is Linux developers appearing to whine that Google didn't do things the way they "should have been done", and on the other side it's Google appearing to be arrogant by expecting that every technical decision they made is the best one and that everyone else should see that and accept it as-is with great fanfare and many thanks.