[niftich]

While I don't entirely disagree with your premise, this oft-repeated argument misses some key points.

Every user is free to make changes themselves but upstreaming them to the 'official' repo won't work, because the devs have decided they've moved on. Everyone is free to maintain a publicly-accessible fork, but without community coordination, the forks will diverge, unless widespread community consensus is reached about which one is the preferred survivor repo. Essentially, to solve the problem, merely dumping code isn't sufficient; you must also build a community.

Hence when a project's leadership decides they will no longer release/maintain/fix/accept-pull-requests-for a particular version, all of us lose the single most logical place where collaboration about that particular version happens. This is what I lament, not that woe-be-unto-me, I-have-to-fix-it-myself.