Are all patches created equal?

To me as a non engineer, this seems to be a typical attempt to find a technical solution to a social problem. Clearly, the worth of a patch is a highly subjective measure: the patch that fixes a bug that prevents me from booting clearly is worth more to me than one, that fixes my audio (unless of course, I'm an audio artist and depend on the working of my audio system for a living) which in turn is worth more than a patch that fixes a race condition leading to frequent memory corruption but only on SMP-systems, because I don't own one of those.

Maybe the success of the "Who was kernel X made by?"-series of articles stems from the fact that the statistics used -- unfair as they are -- are seen to have just enough information to be valuable. Everybody knows how these statistics were created (transparency clearly is of value here) and knows to take them with appropriate amounts of salt. So introducing some weighting into these statistics, which -- as our editor admits -- must necessarily be subjective, may in fact reduce their value.

Then again I might just be my ordinary nay-saying lawyerly self, that doesn't see the opportunity to improve the world. Tough being me.