"respectful" as in let's wait years for a maintainer to come up with a solution and when we try to propose our own the maintainer trows a fit and turns it down?

Eh. Although we don't always do things perfectly, Fedora has a pretty strong policy of working with upstreams first.

By contrast in my personal experience as a developer of something that got packaged in Debian, I discovered later that that package had a bunch of patches added, a man page written (!) and so on, none of which was bad, but also none of which was fed back to me at all.

(In case not obvious: I work for Red Hat on Fedora.)

Not really, remember the ssh key fiasco which was also due to a Debian-only patch.

(Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat)