well it could be, since such a bug would reveal a consensus rule previously unknown, that would then likely need to be accounted for by core with guard rails. theres been examples of this in the past.

its interesting you bring up the gentoo issue too. someone else said the same thing to me recently. https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2iuf4s/lukejrs_public_apology_for_poor_gentoo_packaging/

from my reading, this was an unintentional fuck up, that had no effect on anyone? that he maturely owned up to.

nullc even states in that thread "OTOH, while I strongly disagreed with the 'anti-spam' approach (and had long been nagging luke to do more pure behavioral matching on the abusive transaction behavior (censor-magnet, and UTXO bloating)), I am a little sad to see many people criticising a different distribution of Bitcoin Core not just for its own policy decisions but for being different at all.

There is no mandatory official Bitcoin, and when it comes to node policy-- (not consensus rules, of course)-- diversity is valuable, and people should have the ability to control what their computers are doing, how their resources are being spent, etc."