Con's previous exit

I think I might have been slightly misunderstanding the e-mail you linked actually - even when I read it the first time I thought it would be something about the scheduler argument whereas it seems to be about swap prefetch. Is it perhaps the case that Con had already decided to leave over the scheduler debacle, with the linked e-mail constituting a "sorry guys, I've already left the community" message when swap prefetch came up again in discussion?

When I read through them at the time I thought the discussions over the scheduler were badly handled by some developers and that the outcome for Con was not really deserved. The regression I remember him arguing over seem like a rather justified thing to discuss further since it was effectively a case of whether policy should be encoded in the kernel. On the other hand, my understanding of the swap prefetch situation was that there was a lack of hard evidence in favour of it, so the handling of that situation from upstream seemed far more balanced. I think it's fair enough not to tamper with a tricky subsystem unless there's a compelling motivation for it. I'm surprised that it wasn't possible to concoct useful benchmarks for the situation, really, since it didn't actually sound that esoteric.

I did remember the scheduler thing as the straw that broke the camel's back, though, rather than the swap prefetch patch?

Maybe this is all academic anyhow. If Con's doing stuff that's interesting to him and may benefit some users, there's no harm in that - plurality like this is a major benefit of the open source model, so I guess there's not really anything to be unhappy about!