I apologize, I meant no offense. I remember that Wine Staging was originally described as a "fork" and that that was a "good thing", but I can't find the email, or maybe I am remembering an in-person conversation at WineConf 2015. I guess whether Staging is a "fork" depends on your definition of "fork".
I do remember conversations at WineConf where people said that Wine Staging is more committed to making things work for the sake of end users than mainline Wine is. I also remember nv*.dll being mentioned, and I got the impression that nothing like those patches in Staging would ever be considered acceptable in mainline. I may have misunderstood; please correct me if I am wrong.
I'm sorry, that was curt of me. It's a bit of a sore point.
The original wine-staging project may have been described as a fork by Sebastian or Michael. I wasn't there for those conversations. Under Alistair's leadership though we've been trying to orient the project as specifically not a fork, though, and as a place only for patches that were going in the right direction and would eventually make it upstream. That was something we went into detail on at the 2018 Wine conference.