Here's (roughly) how I see what's transpired:

1. Information on the N900 and Maemo 5's UI leaks out. System-wide ASR is conspicuously absent.
2. The existing Maemo community isn't overly shocked or horrified, after all:
   • Nokia hasn't shown great interest in adding rotation support to Maemo in the past. (Please read the comments there. You might call it foreshadowing.)
   • A good portion of the Maemo community has, obviously, been reasonably happy with landscape-only for some time already. Those that aren't, are quite used crafting hacks to work around what Nokia provides.
3. Eager new users, experienced on other platforms, show up excited to express their enthusiasm for Maemo but also their confusion as to how a such a key feature as ASR could be missing.
4. The Maemo community responds with a collective shrug (due to the reasons above), shocking the newcomers (who share none of that history).
5. New users continued to arrive and, having received no real response regarding ASR, become increasingly vocal in their insistence it must be added.
6. Nokia sees the demand for ASR and provides subtle (and not so subtle) hints about why it's not in Fremantle, where it is planned, and what they'd be willing to do in the meantime.
7. From experience, the Maemo community knows better than the newcomers who the Nokia people are and how to read what they're saying, so they see answers where others don't. This widens a nasty gap.
8. The parts of the Maemo community who are particularly keen on screen rotation figure they'll just need to come up with the appropriate hacks for Maemo 5, just as they have for previous releases. They move on to other things (and other threads), putting thoughts about any ASR hacks on the back burner until the final SDK--containing more of the parts they need--arrives.
9. More and more new users arrive and express their need for ASR.
10. Communications continue to degrade. Generalizing, but:
    • One side can't see how anyone could fail to recognize the importance of making ASR happen now.
    • The other side can't understand how anyone could fail to see that ASR can't happen now and that improvements will come over the next weeks and months.
11. Some people from each side fall into shouting at people on the other side for being rude and unhelpful. Each side knows it's obvious, based on experience, what needs to happen.

It's just a shame their experiences are so different...