I came here to post something similar to this. I have seen this happen many times on open source projects, and it is especially depressing for the person who volunteered to write the patch. Going back and forth many times over several months to make small adjustments to your code and never having it committed is very demoralizing.

I don't know what the solution is, and it is probably just an inherit flaw with volunteer-run open source projects. Without someone being paid to get the bug count down it's easy for bugs like this to get forgotten about.