Fear of forking
krow.livejournal.com
krow.livejournal.com
I'm probably 50% right.
You incubated the original idea, and to some that's more valuable then improving the technicalities. Ideas are cheap but initial execution is hard.
On the flip side, for a whole other bunch of people, continued improvement is hard, so the maintainers are the heroes in that instance.
1) You aren't going the direction they think you should go. If this is the case, you don't want the patch anyhow.
2) You have made it too hard to submit patches. They actually found it easier to manage the project themselves rather than go through your patch submission process. Ouch.
3) They think you're doing a bad job as project manager. They would never submit the patch to you anyhow, so nothing is lost by them forking.
And don't forget that if you want the patch, their fork is going to be under the same license, so you can just go grab it from their repo.
We often don't know ahead of time how a decision will work out, so calling these forks "wasted effort" seems to miss their utility as experiments that can drive the direction of future development indirectly.
On the way, they probably learned something they didn't know.
That seems like a more then acceptable outcome.