if i am happy to just quietly run my private patched version, sure. but that's not the point, because the claim is that for a good Open Source (or Free Software) project, it must be possible to go public, and once you do that, if the original developers are unsympathetic then drama is unavoidable.

there have been hostile forks in projects before, even those that eventually had a good ending. egcs for example.

i was part of such a forked project too. it wasn't meant to be hostile, and the drama was limited to the project leaders, but it happened, and feelings got hurt.

not everyone is willing to take that risk.