I did! I did the Google Summer of Code twice with Blender and ever since I find myself preferring the patch workflow of Phabricator over the merge/pull request found elsewhere. I am comfortable with both, but phabricator just clicked with me better
My projects were focused on user interface improvements, so I also spent a lot of time gathering feedback from users. It was really valuable for me to learn how to get feedback at different stages of the development cycle, and also to learn how to filter the good from the bad feedback.
I hope Gitea is accepted!