SELF: Anatomy of an (alleged) failure

Well, in fact none of the examples given in the original article are about code submitted by a distribution. All of them, and also the ones from your previous comments, fall into the common category where someone, apparently from the "outside", brings us a feature (not being a device driver) complete with bells and whistles and wants us to take it. People generally don't react well to that, which is not surprising (to me at least).

Moreover, such "complete features" often do much more than is really necessary to address the particular problem their submitters had in mind when they started to work on them. In many cases this "extra stuff" makes them objectionable. In some other cases they attempt to address many different problems with one, supposedly universal, feature which confuses things. It also often happens that the feature submitters are not willing to drop anything or redesign, because of the amount of work it took them to develop their code, so the objections cause the entire feature to be rejected eventually.

Now, if you do something that people are not going to react well to and you give them good technical reasons to object to it, you shouldn't be surprised too much when it fails in the end, should you?