Linux 5.12's very bad, double ungood day

patchwork tries to find code submissions not addressed to it directly. All other code review solutions require everything to be sent to them directly, they act as gateways. That's the very simple reason why they have all the information and all work better.

The icing on the cake is of course recipient-controlled email notifications instead of sender-control notifications (a.k.a... "spam"). In other words people routinely subscribe and unsubscribe to/from individual code reviews; not possible with a crude mailing list.

None of this is rocket science, it's all very easy to see and understand except when obsessing about the "email versus web" user interface questions; these debates are not "wrong" but they hide the much more important backend and database design issues.

You could totally have a gateway type code review tool entirely driven by email. In fact requesting all submissions, review comments and approvals or rejections to be sent (by email) to patchwork directly and putting patchwork in better control of the git repo would get at least half-way there.