Comment by dwaite

However, it may only get merged in by being conceptually re-thought and reimplemented, like the Linux USB or KGI projects back in the day.

The general pushback for changes in Linux are against large impactful changes. They want your code to be small fixes they can fully understand, or drivers that can be excluded from the build system if they start to crash or aren't updated to a new API change.

You can't take a years-maintained external codebase and necessarily convert it to an incremental stream of small patches and optional features for upstream maintainers, unless you knew to impose that sort of restriction on yourself as a downstream maintainer.