> At a certain point, it's easy to get the impression that your time is intentionally being wasted by people who have no interest in ever accepting your work.
This. There's certainly a lot of good engineering work done in the kernel community, and it's good that there are people who care about code quality and can say 'no' to stuff which is no good. But after working with the community for a while, you can't help but get the feeling that many of the people saying 'no' *also* enjoy just exercising their ability to say 'no'.