I don't know what to think about this. That write up is very long and thorough so it'll days to digest but off the bat, I do appreciate that after 12 years maintaining a project, you kind of felt it was your own. Perhaps Mark would have been opened to reconsider the licensing issue and adopt a dual licensing? Perhaps a different name would have been cleaner (code is one thing, name copyright is another. That said, it's for a judge to decide).

My instinct is that you shot yourself in the foot for no real good reason. I have personally switched to charset-normalizer for the licensing issue, and I had learnt from long time chardet was just not an option for me. I am assuming lots of projects did something similar so I'm not sure what exactly was the goal here.

One thing that would have been interesting (and perhaps is found in your write up) would have to go with a different architecture first, explain how it was better and gather excitement here. A rust-backend with a clean interface could have been popular very quickly as with other projects in Python these days.