> Your comment makes no sense at all. You do not need to get a PR merged before you can use your changes.

What you said was:

> Wouldn't it have been far more efficient to contribute back to protoc?

My point was about the bureaucracy of contributing back upstream. Nonetheless, your new point, that patching and using your own fork is preferable makes sense on the surface given the ease of forking in go projects. Be interested to hear the author's reasoning.