Well what a surprise; I was totally unaware of this! Thanks!
What else stopped them then to back Maemo? they had everything in place; except multitouch, which would have been added latest by 2010, putting them ahead / on par with iphone, and full integration via qt with symbian apps. I mean, w0t? The magnitude of this patatrac (to use a nice word) just grew exponentially; this had all the numbers to be a slam dunk and instead turned into a smelly turd that doesnt want to flush down the toilet!

Does this prove that Harmattan per se was redundant and that maemo could have made it just as much?
EDIT: by backing i mean "release more devices with maemo"

EDIT#2: from a different angle.

Could jolla have ditched harmattan in favour of Maemo, upgraded gtk to latest to get the multitouch, replaced QT 4.7 with 5.1 on top of it, integrated libhybris, and released a device?

Assuming it'd be doable (then again what is not nowadays), it could have potentially yield quite a good experience.

Cant stop but think now; I wonder what it'd take to get maemo to work with libhybris?