So you do agree that there are options beyond forking it or merely "raising a ruckus on the mailing list". My point was precisely that there are additional answers and that just glibly saying "Well, just fork it or accept what the mailing list result is" isn't a good summary of the alternatives, and in the context of what you were replying to borders on deceptive.
In the meantime, the fact that I am rich with options doesn't negate the original discussion, which is that the Apache processes are becoming distinctly suboptimal for the context they work in. The fact that I can just take the software and run with it doesn't fix their processes, and the fact that anybody can do so doesn't excuse broken processes. The fact that we can fork does not mean everybody should just stop discussing Apache processes; it doesn't follow.
I'm still in context: "I was was almost driven to start blogging last week by ASF's poor job of maintaining its projects. There was a small bug in Solr. I was not the first to find this bug, and someone had not only reported the bug, but filed a patch on the bug tracker a year and a half ago. The patch was never merged in, nobody provided any feedback as to why the patch wasn't merged in." "You can just fork it" is not an answer to this problem. I'd say in its own way it's a disguised confession that in fact the problems with the project are indeed so bad that your only hope is to fork it yourself. Well, that still says bad things about the project, regardless of whether I have mitigation options.