Honestly, the entire process of open-source contribution is broken. People should just fork and compete on the free 'market'. If you have a good idea / PR, just keep patchsets. People should mix and match the patch sets as they like. Maintainers who want to keep their version active will be forced to merge proper patch sets. The key argument against this is the difficulty integrating patch sets.

This should be easier with AI. Most LLMs are pretty good at integrating existing code.