Why is ffmpeg obsolete?

I have been using ffmpeg to convert audio files to MP3 format for my commercial web service and have found out that ffmpeg is no longer available in my version (12.04), and in fact everything is moving toward "avconv", claiming that ffmpeg has been deprecated and is no longer developed (which isn't true).

This becomes a problem when I do something as basic as convert a FLAC file to MP3, and come to find out that the ID3 'duration' tag is broken. A 2 minute song says it's 20 minutes long, when I play it in QMMP. It's a serious bug that I can't present to my paying customers.

With some research I've come to find out that Debian/Ubuntu has migrated to avconv and will not include ffmpeg in the standard repos. This would not be so much of an issue if it weren't for avconv behaving as if it WERE ffmpeg, when it's clearly not the case. Just in 5 minutes I've felt like ffmpeg is higher quality and my personal preference. Keep avconv, but don't have an 'ffmpeg' binary that points to it. Especially with the deprecation message. That's misleading. And even if it's being deprecated, why not make room (with the soon-to-be-non-existent "ffmpeg" binary) for the "original" (base) ffmpeg, and let the two co-exist?

With some guidance from the folk on #ffmpeg on irc.freenode.net, I've been told that this all underlies from a serious political battle over the project's management. At this point since FFMPEG is being actively developed, I would argue that it's a bug for "avconv" to impersonate ffmpeg and then say ffmpeg is obsolete. In just 5 minutes I've come across a bug that shows how buggy (and IMO inferior) avconv is to the ffmpeg it claims to be.

If "ffmpeg" is deprecated in the sense that avconv should be used directly, then why not let people really use ffmpeg if they want? Or is it about politics and the avconv developers not wanting to promote their own (separate/distinct) project? It's political decisions that make me really dislike a distribution,, something very much not in the spirit of open source.

I would like to just see that avconv not claim to be ffmpeg anymore, and allow the real ffmpeg from ffmpeg.org to be back into the repo, without anybody having their political bias distort an open source community project that's supposed to benefit people everywhere. It's clear that this is a highly charged issue and I would suggest ffmpeg and avconv could co-exist in the core repos, especially if the 'ffmpeg' binary right now urges people to use avconv. If there is any chance that the 'real' ffmpeg is not allowed to co-exist with avconv because that would mean nobody would use avconv or even know what it is (with that somewhat deceptive "deprecated" message), then I would suggest that's a political bias that doesn't belong in the open source community. That along with other decisions I don't agree with (ie Unity) is enough to get me to switch to Fedora or the like.

Please, why not let ffmpeg and avconv co-exist?