A passing non-technical observation, but seeing:

> "There is clearly a top-down push from Fedora's corporate sponsor to be AI-friendly..."

struck me as being at the core of this, and hence the remark about not being able to move things forward in a "community way".

I comprehensively ditched all involvement with Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS years ago when Red Hat's policy-making effectively reversed/withdraw a previously publicly stated-in-writing EOL support date. When the corporate sponsor starts doing things like that, the rest is fairly predictable. Even without an LLM to tell us.
_

History shows us that being a voice near the beginning of technological developments can result in that shaping things longer-term; but it's not a given, many voices are drowned out or fall away even when they're the 'better' approach, just because power often overrides correctness, and from time to time we've seen a body plough into something late on in the day after others have paid extensively for the early development and exploration.

It seems fundamentally naïve to think that one corporate sponsor can somehow steer things by doing something technically sensible. The time, money and effort would eb more effective (though ethically questionable) spent on lobbying.

I'm not surprised people might make decisions to cease their involvement and support. I'm sure others with a different set of values, goals & beliefs will join up to be part of the stampede.