Why Debian returned to FFmpeg

This whole line of reasoning is a bunch of baloney right on the face of it, I'm not intimately familiar with the personalities and code between ffmpeg and libav but this is just blatantly wrong.

The "merge everything they make" activity could flow both ways, both projects have the opportunity to merge each others changes, if the policy of merging most of the libav changes into ffmpeg has made ffmpeg a stronger software then it's libav policy against merging ffmpeg changes which has made them the weaker project.

As far as any negative criticism of libav being due to some Internet-wide smear campaign, wow, that justification is basically never right, the universe does not revolve around the petty differences of a couple of folks, I can't imagine that most people who ship either library really cares about the split, they just want something that works, so the idea that a "smear campaign" could gain any traction is laughable. Ha ha ha. This is especially true for Google which is spending their time and money to fuzz test this software, which is an incredible gift, and has real metrics to back their statements, not whispers.