If they felt they needed information from, say, the Linux scsi maintainers then they could have gone out and asked for it. If they thought that in order for udev to do a proper job with these devices they needed the sg3-utils maintainers to write something new, they could have gone and asked for that. As it was they just stuck a "needs-new-home" label on the bug and ignored it.

I think useful action would have been more likely if udev had still been maintained by a team who believed they'd taken on the responsibility to make /dev/disk/by-path work, rather than maintained as a small part of a project whose maintainers are mostly interested in other things.

(Also, IIRC from what I had to do to work around it, they could have fixed that bug by reverting the change that introduced it. It wasn't a case of existing udev code not working with new hardware; it was caused by someone making changes without understanding the consequences.)