[midoridensha]

>It's somewhat ironic that you've included X.org in that list given (a) its history, and (b) how much time and effort has been spent in recent years on creating something to replace it.

There's nothing "ironic" about it at all. For many, many years, X.org was the only real display server that anyone used, after they all abandoned XFree86 for good reason. Wayland didn't come about until later, and even then, *it was made by the same people*. It was never a competing project.

>if I have strong feelings on how a particular piece of software should work, and it's made clear that the project leads disagree and any patch to implement such will be rejected

This is understandable, but frequently not the case. The KDE/Gnome fiasco, for instance, all started because of an argument about a license.

>merely an observation that when people work on project for the enjoyment of it, rather than for a living

Here again, it's frequently not the case. In the KDE/Gnome fiasco, many of the devs there were employed full-time by companies like RedHat to work on it. So it was really political.