It's worth pointing out that the FreeBSD implementation (on AMD64) only promotes 4kB pages to 2MB pages and doesn't transparently promote to 1GB pages.
Given alc@ was an author on the paper (and the paper's FreeBSD 4.x implementation supported multiple superpage sizes), I'm not really sure why FreeBSD's pmap doesn't have support for 1GB page promotions.
All the technical critique seems fair but it seemed like they (both as an individual and as a company) were a first time contributor and no outreach was really done to pull them in further. I guess LineRate imploded within F5 so there could have been structural problems inside there prevented them from doing a fully baked contribution anyway.
Can you clarify what you mean by "underhanded and unfortunate way?" The thread I can see on freebsd-hackers@ had a little feedback, including some very valid critiques (the code was developed against 9.x, then ported to 10.x without testing, at a time when 11 was CURRENT) and the original author just didn't follow up at all:
Given alc@ was an author on the paper (and the paper's FreeBSD 4.x implementation supported multiple superpage sizes), I'm not really sure why FreeBSD's pmap doesn't have support for 1GB page promotions.