I used patches and lists before, a lot. It was either hard or impossible to track more than one at a time, in context and with lots of conversations around specific lines of code. It was also a nightmare for maintainers to constantly want to tell people to rebase their patches based on other people's patches. To link patches to other patches to issues, etcetera.

The Github website and its fork/pull request flow has increased my productivity and the amount of things I contribute to or can maintain with some level of sanity 100x easily.