Doug, the point is not about avoiding something, but about getting the best out of the available options. Actually, you can't compare directly one option with another, because each of them has its own case of usage.
So far, OS/4 has added nothing that seems to be useful. It does break system dumps, which is a major handicap for those who develop software for eCS. Add the questionable legal status, and I don't see any reason to use it. That doesn't mean that I will stop testing it, but I won't spend much time trying to figure out problems, until it offers some advantage. One must also remember that it is not guaranteed to work in all cases (or even work, at all). I find that those releases which work, work well. Those that don't work, are completely broken, but there is no clue what was changed, and it should be obvious to the programmers that there is a problem. It seems that they just make the package available, whether it works, or not.
The way it goes now the developers seem to divert more and more from the standard. No doubt they have good reasons for that, but imho it's a mistake.
If they are doing that to figure out exactly what works, and doesn't work, I cannot find fault (even when it doesn't work, at all). However, if they intend to make a proper release in that state, I agree that it is a mistake.
QSINIT, on the other hand has solved a serious problem with memory being limited to 512 meg (4 GB installed), on some machines. As a bonus, it adds the RAMDISK that uses memory above what OS/2 can normally access, which also offers the possibility of using that memory for other things. There is also no question about the legality, even though the license is not very good. I suspect that that is a misunderstanding on the author's part. The intent seems to be to prevent somebody from profiting from the project, but it puts the project into a gray area, where it is not clear if it is meant to prevent inclusion in eCS (which could be argued to be non profit), or if it is meant to prevent General Motors (for example) from using it to make a profit by using eCS with QSINIT. Either way, it makes QSINIT mostly useless, and therefore irrelevant because no business, or government, can take the chance on what a judge might think about it. Then again, the license is probably unenforceable anyway. Oh yeah, you can play a couple of games with it, but I am not too sure why anybody would want to do that. I can see the possibility of adding a "standard interface" to the machine, making things like video adapters, or disk drives, more compatible to the eCS drivers (much like what virtual machines do).