The patch that kicked off the current conflict was the 'journal_rewind' patch; we recently (6.15) had the worst bug in the entire history upstream - it was taking out entire subvolumes.
The third report got me a metadata dump with everything I needed to debug the issue, thank god, and now we have a great deal of hardening to ensure a bug like this can never happen again. Subsequently, I wrote new repair code, which fully restored the filesystem of the 3rd user hit by the bug (first two had backups).
Linus then flipped out because it was listed as a 'feature' in the pull request; it was only listed that way to make sure that users would know about it if they were affected by the original bug and needed it. Failure to maintain your data is always a bug for a filesystem, and repair code is a bugfix.
In the private maintainer thread, and even in public, things went completely off the rails, with Linus and Ted basically asserting that they knew better than I do which bcachefs patches are regression risks (seriously), and a page and a half rant from Linus on how he doesn't trust my judgement, and a whole lot more.
There have been many repeated arguments like this over bugfixes.
The thing is, since then I started perusing pull requests from other subsystems, and it looks like I've actually been more conservative with what I consider a critical bugfix (and send outside the merge window) than other subsystems. The _only_ thing that's been out of the ordinary with bcachefs has been the volume of bugfixes - but that's exactly what you'd expect to see from a new filesystem that's stabilizing rapidly and closing out user bug reports - high volume of pure bugfixing is exactly what you want to see.
So given that, I don't think having a go-between would solve anything.
You don't have to agree with all other maintainers on everything, but if you're working on Linux (or any other major project that's owned, run and developed by other people), you need to have the people skills to at a minimum avoid pissing everyone else off. Or you need to delegate the communication work to someone with those skills. It's a shame you don't.
Which also, at times, means appeasing people even when you are confident that they are wrong because you need their cooperation in the future. In a large complicated system, being able to work together is often more important to the system's reliability, performance, etc. than being as right as possible.
Plus even when you're confident you are in the right you might still be in the wrong. After all, the people you are disagreeing with are also superbly competent and they believe they're in the right just as you do. There can be hills worth dying on, but they ought to be very rare.
Being unwilling to follow basic QA processes in preparation of a release candidate, and then doubling down by attacking the release engineer with claims the QA process doesn't apply to you because you know better, is something that is far more serious than lacking basic soft skills. It's a fireable offense in most companies.
In a company there are other employees who have your success as part of their job function. People to train you, to talk you down off a ledge, people to step in and guard you against misunderstanding or criticisms. People to advocate for you or send you home before a dispute crosses a point of no return. You're also paid to be there, to put up with the companies BS, .. the project isn't yours, it's not usually your reputation that's hurt when the company wants to make a decision you don't agree with and it goes poorly.
The context is so different, I don't think it's really comparable.
Yes, and they enforce basic relase processes to ensure you don't break releases by skipping QA processes or introducing untested and unverified features in release candidates.
And you sure as hell don't have primadonna developers stay in the payroll for long if they start throwing tantrums and personal attacks towards fellow engineers when they are asked to follow the release process or are called out for trying to sneak untested changes in mission-critical components.