OK, I think I followed your metaphor, up to this point. What in the world does this "official sign" represent? I see a bunch of old Maemo hands (especially the Mer guys) over there, who are apparently represented by your friends who are now helping Jim. But you're saying you specifically are disallowed from Jim's treehouse, does this mean you specifically, or a certain Average-Joeish subset of the Maemo community in general, are in some way disallowed from MeeGo? Did I miss some snub of the Maemo community by MeeGo? AFAIK the only reason Average Joes aren't mucking about with MeeGo is because it's only half-done, not because they've been deemed unwelcome.

The nearest I can come up with (and I feel like I'm really reaching here, so I'm quite possibly wrong) is that this is a reflection of the notion that, because there's no official MeeGo-on-N900 release, there won't be an end-user ready one at all. If so, I think you badly misread Jim's official sign.

I do understand where that idea comes from -- after all, Nokia said more or less the same things about non-official, but more-or-less Nokia-funded community backport of Maemo 5 to the N8x0, named Mer. It was supposed to be the equivalent of the old OS200xHE backports to the 770, only now community-driven so we wouldn't have to wait on Nokia for update and bugfixes. And it died without progressing from hacker's toy to end-user OS update.

Now, we're told that there'll be no official Maemo6/Harmattan/MeeGo/whatever release for the N900, but it's being adapted to the N900 because (for now) the N900 is the standard ARM dev platform, and Nokia's dropping hints, though not promising, that you should be running a bright shiny community build on your N900 in six months to a year. And there's reason, I grant, to suppose that, as this is equally non-official, it'll be equally dead when the next device arrives.

But there's at least one major difference that I've not seen mentioned at all:

• The N8x0->N900 transition was a huge hardware jump, from an OMAP2 platform to OMAP3. Since many system components (including a bunch of closed ones that might have been made redistributable) depended, directly or not, on that hardware shift, you couldn't just run the new userland on the old hardware with just the kernel and some low-level drivers swapped out. To get a good port, access to the source of many of these would be required, or writing a replacement from scratch.
  
• The N9 (or whatever the first Meego device is -- I'll call it N9 here), by all (unconfirmed) leaked reports, is an OMAP3, and specifically an OMAP3640 -- essentially identical to the N900's OMAP3430, but with a process shrink and higher clocks. While this similarity doesn't necessarily make it legal to procure a copy of Nokia's Harmattan release for the N9, mash it up with the latest hackers-only N900 build, and come up with what amounts to a Harmattan-N900 build, I think it will make it technically straightforward, and going from there to legal will only require Nokia to make some closed components redistributable to owners of previous Nokia devices, not open-source or even globally re-distributable -- much easier to push through.

There's also the whole point that MeeGo's aiming to be more open and more upstream-aligned than Maemo 5, which should also ease things (i.e. much less, if any, platform-level stuff will be obstacles), but that's been hashed around already.