Thoughts on the addition of Core maintainers
Historically I'm not aware of any long term Core contributor putting themselves forward as a potential Core maintainer and being rejected/blocked. We recently saw that with Vasil Dimov where two maintainers (fanquake, glozow) blocked him from becoming a maintainer for 5 months with Vasil eventually closing the related pull request.
When it is a contributor who has clearly demonstrated value and expertise opening pull requests and reviewing pull requests over a number of years (in Vasil's case in a part of the codebase that existing maintainers aren't familiar with covering Tor, I2P, alternative networks etc) there really should be a solid rationale for blocking that long term contributor from becoming a maintainer. I was always under the impression that the maintainer role was essentially janitorial. Of course occasionally there are disagreements between long term contributors and these views have to be weighed up when assessing whether to merge or not merge a particular pull request. But two maintainers blocking a long term contributor from becoming a maintainer is not janitorial. That is an opinionated stance that held for 5 months until another maintainer (Andrew Chow) reversed his initial ACK and NACKed the pull request shortly before Vasil closed it.
The only valid reasons I can think of for blocking such a long term contributor from becoming a maintainer are related to temperament and/or trust. There is nothing I am aware of that suggests Vasil is lacking in either. (This is assuming an upper limit on the number of desired maintainers hasn't been reached. Clearly not every long term contributor needs or should be a maintainer.)
Andrew Chow has now proposed ryanofsky as a new maintainer. Again a long term contributor who has clearly demonstrated value and expertise opening pull requests and reviewing pull requests over a number of years. Surely it is fair to apply the same rationale that was belatedly given by Andrew (5 months after Vasil's PR was opened) to justify blocking Vasil from becoming a maintainer to ryanofsky? Or is requesting and scrutinizing these rationales "rude" and "aggressive" as I have been accused of being and anyone who isn't a maintainer should just accept the decisions made by current maintainers? It feels like to me that the current maintainers have a very different approach to previous maintainers (Wladimir etc) who were happy to discuss their merge decisions on IRC. Andrew is the most responsive but fanquake, glozow seem to think they can make whatever decisions they like and don't have to explain them or justify them to anyone publicly. Assuming this is true this is concerning with regards to merge decisions generally (including potentially contentious ones) on top of this particular issue of the addition of new maintainers.
Addressing the two lines in the above that end with question marks, as the rest seems to be information or your opinion (which, of course, you're entitled to):
Sure, that seems fair, although I don't think a previous criteria should be expected to be exhaustive or binding---situations and opinions change.
Following some of your links, I believe I found the source of you being called rude and aggressive:
I think rude and aggressive are accurate descriptions of your behavior there.
Nobody has to accept the decisions made by current maintainers. Everyone receiving a copy of the Bitcoin Core source code has the ability to modify it and share those modified versions. That's what open source means. It doesn't mean that the people who helped create that software have do anything for you.