> Braam really took Neovim personally and got better at getting stuff into vim that he wouldn't merge before once neovim was arround as a competitor. I really lost track of vim in the last years because neovim is just a solid platform with an active community.
I think that's the answer - the specific makeup of any given team isn't as relevant as competition which spurs competitors to either keep up or the more successful upstarts to take over.
We saw some complaints about a repo like this I forget for what project some weeks back here on HN and it came down to, people dropping a PR and then the maintainer left holding the bag if something goes wrong, having to maintain someone else's code, which can become a problem if its a completely new feature they didn't implement or want, but users wanted. The other case is, they fix a bug, then disappear, so if the maintainer has feedback, now they have to take time to check out the person's code, update it, out of their current planned work.
I wonder if more open source projects would benefit from adding plugin architecture so people can do those one-off features as plugins without "tainting" the core project.
Honestly in open source I'd argue it's not. If an OSS project has significant usage, if BDFL struggles/etc - community forks can put the project back on pace. NeoVim is the classic (successful) example that gave us a great alternative while also nudging the BDFL into the modern age.
Communist assets?