The idea that we outsiders have to research mtier to decide that it's not very much of a third party after all is just odd.

I don't want to seem adversarial, and I want to like openbsd, but it's hard.

If openbsd developers do it, why don't they make it official and provide it from openbsd.org? They could still plaster "this is thanks to funding from mtier" on the site prominently.

The OpenBSD developers are unwilling to do anything that makes some architectures better than others, and M:Tier is unwilling to build stable updates for everything. Perhaps this will change one day as hardware continues to consolidate, but that's the way it is for now.

http://www.openbsd.org/plat.html

As far as I know, the patches are submitted to the -stable ports tree. mtier just provides a very convenient way to perform binary updates.

I fail to see any downsides to this arrangement.