If the fork is closer to the final result that most people want, it's a no-brainer that developers, maintainers and the community will follow. There's no incentive to stay behind.
It's worth studying the case of OpenOffice.org and MySQL. Both of these weren't satisfactory to the community for <reasons>, so the community forked them and did all the high-demand feature implementation on the fork. Now the original projects that were forked from are near-ghost towns.
It's worth studying the case of OpenOffice.org and MySQL. Both of these weren't satisfactory to the community for <reasons>, so the community forked them and did all the high-demand feature implementation on the fork. Now the original projects that were forked from are near-ghost towns.