[vog]

I also don't get it.

Ever for smaller changes, it is very well known that you better contribute back to the Free Software project - because having your patch included and being maintained there is a lot less trouble than maintaining your fork and updating your patches every few months.

One exception might be one-off changes, but we all know that nothing is more definitive than the temporary.

The only real exception is when your patch is superseded by another patch (or a better solution). Then, you maintian your private patch only until next version is finalized.

[stubish]

It took a lot of work to not fork, and only recently became practical. Features like logical replication, DDL triggers, foreign data wrappers are all useful for this sort of thing and are all new. Companies like Citus and 2nd Quadrant first needed to get the infrastructure in place, so kudos to them and the PostgreSQL core team.