It didn't really shock me when the Reiser thing came to light. I remember back around 2003-2004 (possibly before) when there was all the hoo-haa on the lkml between Reiser's scratchy personality and his attacks on Torvalds, Cox et al., but backed up with a brilliant FS.
It genuinely was faster, especially for lots of small files (the common case in 2003). It was night and day difference when running a busy mail server. It had lots of nice things too, e.g. it was reliably possible to grow a reiserFS while the FS was online / mounted, which was a neat trick in conjunction with LVM.
There were some folks who stepped into the fray to try and lubricate the relationships a little - allowing the community at large to benefit from Reiser's work, by avoiding the need for the tempered Reiser to interact with others while his work was integrated. That never really happened though, there was noone to successfully defang the Torvalds side of the bun fight (which is entirely understandable).
So when the case came to light, i couldn't help wondering if it was more than likely true.
Reading about John McAfee is similar to reading about Hans Reiser - - brilliant minds wasted doing stupid things.