I don't disagree! In particular, a ground-up Rust replacement for the 20% of ntpd that everyone relies on would do a lot of good and be deployable virtually everywhere ntpd is today (Raymond proposed a Go rewrite --- I strongly prefer Go to Rust, but Go has a garbage-collected runtime).

But that's besides the point. Pushing a hostile fork of a popular project, raising money for it, and then abandoning the codebase entirely for a rewrite takes a "special" kind of chutzpah.