Jq Needs Contributors

Jq doesn't seem to need contributors, it needs maintainership. Contributions are a cost to maintainers, as they add more work for them. In the best case they "just" need to review the contribution and handle release management, plus triage incoming issues related to the contribution and maintain the code in perpetuity. In the worst case they need to first do a long back and forth review process to get the contribution into a reasonable state of quality, possibly even having to take over the PR that the original author abandoned.

I'm curious about others experience with handing over maintainership to an organization (one created for the project, not a generic one like the Apache foundation). It comes up as a suggested solution to these things, but to me it doesn't make sense that you would magically find a group of trusted maintainers with the time and energy to spend, if the original problem is that you couldn't find _one_. Seems like a chicken and egg problem where in order to have an org you can hand over maintainership to, you first need to build a working relationship with a group of people that are capable of maintaining the project.

Unfortunately, jq is alien shit. It does incomprehensible things with impenetrable inputs, and yet it somehow still magically works.

When they can manage to turn down the alien dial to a number in the teens, maybe mere mortals could potentially dream of one day touching the code.

Until then, it's still alien shit -- from the future.