It was very entertaining to read the arguments from maintainers of 4 different color libs! I think these open discussions are the power of OS.
It seems to be the classic case of micro optimizations, egos, alpha version libs being faster than mature libs, etc.
There's nothing wrong in forking a project and make it better. Now the fork gets more stars than the original and the first author (which was was credited all along) is whining of jealousy. That's not the ugly side of open source, that's just a guy with an ego problem.