If the "spirit of open-source software development" can't stand for distro maintainers to have strong control over what goes in their own distros, this open-source spirit sounds pretty authoritarian itself. If (for example) I want to maintain my own window manager for my distro and I provide the source under a free license but don't accept outside contributions into my own distribution, what is wrong with that? Isn't that part of the freedom of free software?

Agreed. So many geek people hating Ubuntu this days, probably because they feel "betrayed" as they make Linux more user friendly.

Most of them had contributed zero to Linux, so I don't know where this entitlement sense and emotional response comes from.

If you don't like it, go use whatever you want.

In my experience distros attempting to keep things as close as possible to packages upstream (except for bug fixes) are always the most useable, stable, etc. So I sort of prefer the "authoritarianism" from upstream.

Additionally, an upstream package has authority only on ONE component. The distro has authority on ALL components. That makes ALL the difference.

I actually agree. I like Debian better than Ubuntu because I feel like its packages are generally more reliable for my use. But that doesn't mean I would declare Ubuntu to be "horrible" — just not to my taste. I respect Ubuntu's ambition and hope they are successful in what they are trying to accomplish.

Yeah, I'm not saying Ubuntu is horrible by any means, but I have better luck with distros taking another direction, for the reasons mentioned