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Your 48% is very wrong. From the abstract:

"Our results showed that although casual contributors are rather common (48.98% of the whole population of contributors in the projects analyzed), they are responsible for only 1.73% of the total number of commits."

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It's worth noting that the 1.73%, are also the overlooked or edge case issues that directly effected that developers use case.

It might be a low percentage, but maybe it's the areas where portability and conformance with other libraries are important. The stuff that a core maintainer is less interested in identifying and fixing, because they are already using the library for their particular use case.

48% being the population of contributors actually seems like a fairly low number, given that your average project probably has 1, maybe 2 maintainers. If you had even 3 casual contributors to a 1-man operation, that would be 75%.

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