libsmf has been written with a clear tendency toward "if the SMF is not perfect, we cannot load it". Ardour wants a somewhat more tolerant behaviour, so quite a few of our changes have involved making that the case.

on top of that, we wanted to treat libsmf as a genuinely internal library that so if we wanted to amend it in more fundamental ways, we wouldn't need to stop and think about that for even a second. the first thing that we ever did with it, back in 2009, was to strip the code down to suit that purpose.

we probably could have/should have tried to push a few of our fixes in the direction of libsmf's current maintainer. that's my fault, but also a function of time overload.