You mentioned the full extent of your attempt at contributing to open source consisted of a grand total of two meager pull requests.
I'm sorry to say but if throughout all those years you only managed to put together two patches then quite obviously you did close to zero contributions, both in absolute and in relative terms.
In fact, it seems you complain more about floss than actually contribute stuff.
I find that I general it's terribly easy to get your pull requests accepted to random FLOSS projects. Whether your PR is janitorial work, fixing bugs or adding features, you don't need much work to get your contribution in. So, quite frankly it sounds like you are grossly exaggerating and overstating not only the extents of your work but also the challenges you supposedly face.
> Then there's the issue of dependencies. My cool tool for analysing satellite photos won't be of much use to anyone who doesn't have API access to a satellite ground station.
In that case your so called cool tool to analyse satellite photos sounds very poorly designed. I mean, the whole FLOSS earth observation stack is designed literally from the ground up with extensive separation of concerns in mind (see GDAL and proj4 and orpheo toolbox for example) and apparently somehow you failed to learn the lesson that everyone doing professional, academic, and even amateur work knows by heart.