Thanks to Tony Finch's evidence, I'm now realizing two key points that were unclear to me as a follower of the project since only 2018.
1) In 2013, a long-adopted policy of having a Zone for each ISO 3166 country was abandoned at Paul's discretion [1], a decision that was disputed at the time and didn't seem to have much support from others.
2) Paul's initial changes in 2013-2014 to unify zones that don't differ post-1970, starting alphabetically with African Zones, *were indeed highly disputed at the time.* In particular, Stephen Colebourne, who's been the most vocal opponent of the current changes, laid out the exact same justifications back then! As did others who are commenting today.
For examples, see threads [2-8].
If anyone is reading Paul's current justifications for these changes, one comes away with the impression that people are only complaining now that it's European countries' Zones being merged rather than African countries' Zones. Paul himself wrote in his justification [9]:
> It's a bad look for us that so much concern about Norway and Sweden has
> appeared on this mailing list, even though hardly anybody seems to have
> cared about Angola and Congo. It'll be an even worse look if we ignore
> this issue weeks, months or even years after it's been made clear to us.
This description is not only demonstrably false, as the above examples show, but indelicate and incendiary given the context -- namely, that Paul is invoking racial and national bias to motivate the changes this time. In another thread recently Paul wrote that "the equity issue has broadened and is now visible outside our little community" [10]. So why give this false and misleading impression of people's motives to those outside our little community?
As further context for my remarks, I'd like to add that, although I'm relatively new to the project, I have tremendous respect for Paul's contributions to it over the decades. His long-standing practice of providing insightful history, context, links, and pop culture examples throughout the project files and this mailing list is directly responsible for my own fascination with tzdb.
Best,
Scott Kilpatrick