If it really was so urgent why didn't Kent just tell people to get those updates from his personal tree? There are rules in place if you want your stuff to get into Linus's tree, expecting Linus to pull whatever you sent him without any resistance whatsoever is likely just going to end up with him deleting your project, just like what happened here.
Because distributions don't ship Kent's kernel tree, and they're not going to. Distributions like Fedora ship as close to mainline as possible these days because of the pain experienced from shipping a heavily patched kernel in the past. Release cycles are upwards of 3 months for Linus' tree. With that kind of lengthy release cycle, for an experimental codebase which is undergoing rapid stabilization it was the right call: you don't want old code to linger around longer than necessary when they're predominantly bug fixes that successfully pass regression tests. The choice should be with the maintainer.
