> Obstinate maintainership is a real failure mode of open source

I agree, but I also think sometimes that people think it's obstinate maintainership and it's not. For example, large PRs are hard to merge from a contributor who is fresh to the project because there is so much careful review that needs to be done, it's very resource intensive.

That said, one of my goals of becoming a maintainer has to be to try and making submitting a PR more friendly. Feel free to submit a PR to pip, I will be happy to help you get over any teething issues.