The eudev project launches

Exactly. The kernel regresses a lot, but I know that none of those regressions are intentional, and I have never yet reported a regression and had anything but helpfulness from the famously robust and brutal kernel community. Say what you like, but when it comes to regression management, the kernel is not half bad nowadays. (One hardware-dependent network card lockup bug got repeatedly overlooked and headscratched over, but eventually solved -- it just took a year and a half before I figured out a way to get useful debugging out of it so that anyone else stood a chance. I had to make do with an obscure and ugly workaround in the meantime, but the workaround was given to me in only hours after the initial report.)