I think a better way to put this is "don't send requests out of the blue if you care about them getting merged". I often hack on software that I use to make it

I think a better way to put this is "don't send requests out of the blue if you care about them getting merged". I often hack on software that I use to make it do something I need. I then try to upstream the code, if I think that it's something others may want too. I don't particularly care about it being merged -- my attitude to this is "Here's something I found useful, if other people think it's good please take it". I'm willing to put some effort into cleaning up the patch to make it submission-worthy, but if it doesn't get merged, it doesn't get merged. I'll keep it up in a fork, and that's about it. I don't care about it getting upstreamed enough that I will open a dialogue before I start to work on it. It's a feature I want, and I will be working on it regardless of how the dialogue goes down. The only way a dialogue can help me is by giving me implementation advice, but quite often I've already figured out a way to do it which is sufficient for my purposes (hacky or otherwise). If there's a feature that you actually care about existing in upstream, then you should totally open an issue first and discuss it.