> This is an odd thing to bring up though because that's quite literally the only way to make any changes to suckless software, editing source code in C.

You're ignoring the part where the tools are often a fraction of the size and complexity of similar tools. I can go through a 5K SLOC program and understand it relatively quickly, even if I'm unfamiliar with the programming language or APIs. I can't do the same for programs 10 or 100x that size. The code is also well structured and documented IME, so changing it is not that difficult.

In practice, once you configure the program to your liking, you rarely have to recompile it again. Like I said, I'm using a 5 year old st binary that still works exactly how I want it to.

Maintaining a set of patches is usually not a major problem either. The patches are often small, and conflicts are rare, but easily fixable. Again, in my experience, which will likely be different from yours. Our requirements for how we want the software to work will naturally be different.

The madness you describe to me sounds like a feature. It intentionally makes it difficult to add a bunch of functionality to the software, which is also what keeps it simple.