Re: Place your bets...
"a lot of their other patches were rejected as invalid"
I have read the thread, have you? "A lot" is simply wrong. I saw one where they followed the api documentation to the letter. The documentation says:
* If this function returns an error, kobject_put() must be called to
* properly clean up the memory associated with the object. This is the
* same type of error handling after a call to kobject_add() and kobject
* lifetime rules are the same here.
so they submitted a patch to change a kfree to a kobject_put as the documentation directs. The patch was reviewed and accepted. In this case, the documentation was wrong.
There are precious few others. The count might be up as high as two by now. Against this there are a lot (objectively true) of real bug fixes where maintainers either NACKed the revert or said they would just have to do the fix over again if it was reverted.