Following Texrat's trend of explaining real life experiences:

I'm the father of two little kids. They are lovely and they enjoy so much playing with each other and with their parents... except when they fight. And they fight quite regularly, actually.

The reasons for a fight can be many if you look at the surface: he is breaking the lego tower I just finished, he took my sword and ran away, he took and ate my piece of bread / no you gave it to me... and so on.

Actually the root reasons are basically two most of the times: they are hungry or they are tired or (worse) both.

The Maemo community is hungry of new hardware and fresh software. All you mention past times of community help and collaboration. Well, those were times when you all were busy with new stuff.

And a noticeable % of the most vocal guys of this community seem to be quite tired about certain things, and certain people. Because, let's not forget, all this "polarism" (as Texrat puts it) can be reduced to the discussions of a dozen of posters with hundreds/thousands of posts each.

The solution for hunger is coming and you don't need to blame yourselves since no Council or no Alternatives will change the dates.

The solution for tiredness however is all in the side of these bunch of veteran posters (and yes I take my piece of cake). Texrat put it well: give a rest to the Quick Reply button. Don't play ping pong, don't try to have the last word. You have exchanged already hundreds of posts between yourselves that are of little interest out of that elite of top posters.

If there is something you find hostile, upsetting, infuriating... the Maemo community probably doesn't need another Quick Reply about it from you right now. Give it a rest, move forward and make something more satisfying out of your time. If the next morning you still care about that post, have a look at it. Most probably someone else will have continued the thread and now the things will be settling.

And also very important: all these top posters have the best intentions with newcomers. However, the best favor someone can do to a newcomer is... provide her a good atmosphere to land and leave him time and space to have her own say. Chains of Quick Replies from the usual suspects arguing each other definitely don't help feeling anybody comfortable here.