[sanderjd]

It is a good deal of work to put together a merge-worthy pull request, and doing so is no guarantee of its inclusion, or even consideration. Just as an anecdote, I find it increasingly hard to justify the time to turn monkey-patches we've made to Rails (and its accompanying libraries) into pull requests and maintain them against changes upstream, when they often languish without comment from anyone with commit bit. I don't believe project maintainers have any sort of duty to keep on top of random pull requests, but it's pretty easy to lose the motivation to contribute.