As for "weighing in on Zoid," I fail to see what that has to do with anything. They are free to comment on anything or anyone they like, as are you or me.
Was a design decision not made to not adopt BBR's compression.
Wow, that is about the worst example you could come up with. You know as well as I do that rpteilla couldn't explain that feature good or bad if his life depended on it.
We have added patches from BBR when it has made sense to do so. On multiple occasions, and will do so in the future. Some user-visible features from BBR will likely be adopted in the future. Though probably not that one because we don't buy into the tiny constant factor benefit as important enough to give up verifabilty, and also, as i've explained before, we know how to do much more effective pruning.
"yeah we support that design decision"
You obviously have no real experience in this area. For one thing, they don't say that because they don't understand or pay attention to design issues closely enough to do so, if at all, and for another, if they did, we would still dismiss such comment from "investors" as not interesting. By contrast, we do pay attention when you or Zoidberg or other knowledgable people offer technical feedback. See how that works?
One truth about the inertia of groupthink, is that the participants can't even admit they are subject to it:
Your mistake is you think rpietila has to be involved in the design of a feature or decision to have influence on affirming that decision. In fact if developers are aware of the basic principles of key members of the community, those members can implicitly influence design decisions.