This article is from the perspective of the maintainer, but what about the potential contributor? I've gone down the path described above and I've been equally

This article is from the perspective of the maintainer, but what about the potential contributor? I've gone down the path described above and I've been equally burned by maintainers who are not interested in the feature, not interested in the bug fix, or in general are inactive. I want to contribute to projects instead of simply forking and doing my own thing, but before touching the codebase I want to poke the maintainers to see if the feature, bug, etc. is worth the effort. I'm going to submit an issue before I write a single commit. It's not worth my time understanding a codebase, debugging, submitting a PR just to have it rejected or fade away into the abyss.