That's exactly the problem as I see it. Unless we intend to maintain that fork, people will move to versions that are maintained. If doing that causes problems for some reason, then those who require polyglot will simply not use 4.4.0. I'm in that category for sure.
I don't think this is a problem. For one, the ptach is simple and localized wel enough that I could apply it to any new Polyglot version in a matter of minutes. In the second place, the only problems that people would have that want to switch to another Polyglot fork, is that they lose part of the functionality of 4.4.0. If they switch to another WinBoard version they would exactly lose that same functionality, and three times more. So why would they do it? It is important to realize that _all_ Polyglots that are currently maintained are forks. The original author (Fabien Letouzy) is no longer active in computer chess. Currently active forks are those of Fonzy Bleumers and Michel van den Bergh. So far thir versions did not make it into any of the Linux repositories, but for Windows the original version has been completely replaced (as it was dependent on cygwin1.dll, a problem that was solved by Morning Yellow, whose version served as a basis for the current forks). If we would built native UCI support into WinBoard, (e.g. by incorporating most of the Polyglot code into it) we would have to maintain that code for sure, as no one else would do it for us. It wil be far easier to apply a simple patch to any new Polyglot that might surface because others are maintaining it.
