[chr1]

>responding to new threads on the mailing list -- not just to existing threads

Not all threads are the same, some are very easy to respond, and some require a lot of thinking.

The hardest pull requests are those which are useful in some way, but not really ready to be merged, and maintainer needs to do quite a lot of work to either explain what is wrong with pr or to rework it.

saying "Thanks for the patch; don't know when I'll have time to look at it" as a default response and leaving it for a month isn't very useful, and if it is a "default response", one can assume he got it just by sending pr and not getting other response.