> I work on tooling for a living, and have in fact tried to contribute back to babel but unfortunately there's so much noise and traffic that there's just as good a chance that your PR is stuck in limbo forever than being merged or even reviewed.

I agree it's a two way street and not all maintainers want to be "purely" what people consider a maintainer role unlike me - but it's a lot of responsibility on their part to have to look at every PR in a certain amount of time. I think contributors could also do more to ask and get involved although it will take more energy on both sides parts: like doing a hangout/video call etc even though it feels like people either maintainer or contributor just think making a PR suffices to get something merged when a lot of times it is so much more.

I think what I'm saying is that if you do get the time to make a PR and if employers allowed it, they should also allow for the time it takes to get through the noise and traffic by helping out with maintenance, not just the bug fixes, or that we need a priority kind of thing so that maintainers/contributors see effort from one another to make it better. Yeah it's definetely not that simple but I think we need more people/companies trying it out to really see what the problems are then just talk about it.