[_greim_]

Just dive in. The best way to find issues is to be using modules in your own projects. And of course, be easy to work with, know when to/when not to back down, conform your code to the project's conventions at all times, yadda yadda.

> putting all the work in for a pull request that gets ignored seems like it would be quite annoying

This happens. Popular, active projects especially can be hard to break into. You can start in chat or issue threads first, then PRs once you get a feel for what's expected. Often they'll ask for PRs up front.

However if you have a clearly-beneficial, well-constructed fix, by all means submit an unsolicited PR. They ignore it at their own peril/embarrassment :)