Shocker: when I reviewed the code for both projects, I sent fixes to the one that I found to be of high quality. Why is this surprising?
And no, I'm not "maintaining some fork"--there's no way to submit patches on GitHub, and the only way to get changes in for most projects hosted there is to throw up a copy of your work as a remote for someone to pull from. My disdain for this workflow is already well-documented.
>Shocker: when I reviewed the code for both projects, I sent fixes to the one that I found to be of high quality. Why is this surprising?
Pointing it out doesn't mean it was "surprising". Just that it happened -- and as such, it could be a possible conflict of interest.
"Contributor to project X trashes competitive project Y" is a different situation than "Totally unaffiliated with X and Y person, trashes Y".
Perhaps there was bad blood between the two projects, a backstory with interacting with them, etc -- in which case it would be good to know, that's why I asked.
Now, if there were more technical arguments it wouldn't matter -- they could be evaluated regardless of who tells them --, but your comment was mostly summed to: "they are inferior quality" and "they only succeeded because they use vim's name directly", which doesn't leave much to evaluate.
It would certainly be possible that he contributed code to the project given that.