I should probably just keep it shut but dang it.
What I think the whole argument was back then was that, they treated AGS as a piece of legacy software. From our point of view (an active community) it was not. It is not just a game engine: it is a game development environment, which allows people to create games. The main reason why AGS is what it is, is because of the brilliant IDE.
When they talked about refactoring, they wanted to change all sorts of things, in the engine, to make it more compliant to ScummVM.
That is great, if just for the engine, but that would not work very well for the existing IDE. This was something they weren't that interested in. It sounded a lot to me as if they saw AGS (as a whole) as something obsolete. Not big a deal, just a different point of view I guess.
So we spoke about the alternative:
We start working on a new version of AGS, and they pick up the current. That way we could break compatibility completely, get rid of all legacy code. (note that AGS still has MS DOS stuff in the engine, at least at that time) In the meanwhile, all existing games would run on ScummVM, and thus be future proof, bug free, and work on mobile platforms etc. Win win for everyone, right? Ahhhh but we offended them apparently!
I can remember the discussing of the first paragraph; well it was a proper discussion, not a flame war you get to see sometimes at other places. But after that they just sort of left. I can't remember any hate from our side, maybe I missed this, but what the Dickens?