Indeed. Few things are worse than spending time and effort figuring out a complex repository, making and testing changes to the code and sending in a patch only to get ignored.
Good to see open source hasn't changed in 20 years. This has been my biggest gripe. You have an idea, you present real world use cases, you submit a patch.. Only to have your idea ridiculed or ignored as you point out. THEN, a few weeks/months/years later, your same patch is accepted by someone else with a twitter blue checkmark to rave reviews.
I once asked about the possiblity of adding a feature to a project. I was told before I even created the PR that it wouldn't get accepted because there would be no need for such a feature. I looked at the project a few months later and it had that feature.
Sometimes the biggest problem to getting new contributors is the current contributors. A great example of that is when Laravel asked the community on reddit why they didn't contribute or what was the biggest hurdle. Everyone responded with the guy who was triaging the tickets. Literally, he would act like a Reddit moderator. One line responses such as "Short answer is , no."