The salacious details are always part of this discussion and outside of a very carefully scoped conversation like was requested on the list I think that's always going to happen. On just a technical basis, though, I think bcachefs pays a lot of attention to many of the same issues ReiserFS does, gets more current maintenance, and is maintained more along the lines of kernel interfaces other filesystems use. That last one is the strongest point made in the email to the list.

The advantage of having the creator, designer, and lead maintainer available among free society is definitely real. Regardless of the murder - even if we can separate the man's technical work from the rest of his life activities - he's not doing a lot of work on his creation while he's in custody. He's certainly not going to be furloughed to hackathons or conferences from a murder sentence.