Comment by bonoboTP

> thrives from having a community.

Does it? I think a lot of software projects which are not as huge as the Linux kernel etc. thrive best with a tight core development team, and not from a "community" if you mean that word beyond "users".

Look at it from the point of view of a maintainer. Not sure if you've ever tried. People want to pull your software towards a million incompatible directions. They write some big patch and then get angry if you don't merge it.

My advice: consult the maintainers first whether they agree with your idea and whether they are open to considering your submission. You still won't have a guarantee that it will be accepted, because that's their final say. But at least you won't spend effort coding up something that they could already tell you they don't want to have in their software.