this is an elitist view. many people testing are not really able to do that, but ARE able to get the rc kernels from a distribution. They are not stupid, they know that it can kill their data. They most probably dont have anything mega important on it. Doesnt mean it can be convenient. These people are part of the community and WANT to help bcachefs. They can install rc kernels, they can put data on, test in many scenarios. Do you not want to make life as easy for them as reasonably possible? we are talking a thing to RECOVER DATA, in a very self contained way.

But correct me if im wrong, but it appears you are saying: "well, maybe you were too stupid to read the experimental label, and well.. then you may also be too dumb to compile kents tree. The community doesnt want you, we just do not care to get help from plebs without these skills. buh-bye". Is this really what you want to convey?

Why wouldn't the distro ship the patch, then? What distro is shipping vanilla rc kernels to causal users? Why are casual users using such a distro?

And genuinely, _genuinely_, who is using Linux and can't type three commands into a shell?

Life for them is already not as easy as possible, they've chosen to run an experimental filesystem without backups! If they need to run the recovery today, then getting into the rc doesn't help. If they're waiting for their distro to build the rc, they can't wait a few more weeks for the next release? If they really can't wait, Kent can send them a 5-line bash script to build them a new kernel.

Bottom line: if operate without backups, you've earned your data loss. People being stupid doesn't need to be the Linux kernel's problem.