Sounds about right. Don't know about the internal politics around the original maintainer but the libav folks never seemed right to me. I was glad at the time that the distro I was using left the choice up to the user.

As far as the accusations against both rejecting patches and/or rewriting the code themselves goes I can empathize. It's not always easy to take on maintenance of code that isn't written like you want it to, even if the difference is ultimately immaterial. Sucks when this happens to a fundamental project that is used everywhere though. A good maintainer does need to have some ego but not too much it seems.