And that's the problem. This happens all the time with kernel
drivers, everyone wants the end result of a driver but the
work to actually make it sustainable never gets done. Unless
a driver is actually merged in the upstream kernel, it's not
going to work in the long term. Keeping the driver out of tree
means it loses out on review and updates coming from the
kernel community which is better for the driver in the long
term.
I've no horse in this race, but I've maintained things in the Fedora
kernel, and it's a losing game, you'll get bored keeping up with it.
As for staging, the path out of staging can be that another driver
will subsume the functionality and then this driver will be removed,
afaik we did this for some drivers before.
However I don't think we should be taking on any downstream responsiblity
for drivers we aren't willing to spend time on getting upstream, it gives
people less reason to bother doing things properly.
Dave.