Re: Of course
The only argument for the split was that it was unclear what Oracle was going to do with it
As I remember it, other reasons included difficulty of getting contributions to OpenOffice, and an ultra-painful build system. After the split, the LibreOffice developers did a lot of cleaning up and replaced the build system. As a result, some LibreOffice releases are less bloated and faster than their predecessors, which is practically unheard of in software development!
The cleanups and refactoring probably also make it impossible to consider any common core. At this stage, the best solution is to just rm -rf OpenOffice .