> But i feel like it was always true that patches from the internet at large were largely more trouble then they were worth most of the time.

Oh god, I needed to add a feature to an open source project (kind of a freemium project) about fifteen years ago. I had no experience with professional software development nor did I have any understanding of pull requests. I sent one over after explaining what I was trying to do and that I thought it would be a good feature for the project.

Now they probably shouldn’t have just blindly merged it, but they did, and it really made a mess.

Learned a valuable lesson that day haha.