> Have you ever tried to contribute to open source projects?

yes, and it was often painful enough to make me consider very well wether I want to bother contributing. I can only imagine how terrible the experience must be at a core utility such as ls.

> The question was why wouldn't someone writing software not take the route likely to end in rejection/failure

Obviously they wouldn't - in my comment I assumed that the lsr author aimed for providing a better ls for people and tried to offer a perspective with a different definition of what success is.

> I don't like being jerked around by management, especially when I'm doing it for free

I get that. The older OSS projects become, the more they fossilize too - and that makes it more annoying to contribute. But you can try to see it from the maintainers perspective too: They have actual people relying on the program being stable and are often also not paid. Noone is forcing you to contribute to their project, but if you don't want to deal with existing maintainers, you won't have their users enjoying your patchset. Know what you want to achieve and act accordingly, is all I'm trying to say.