Well they are doing both of course, your patch will still get rejected if it's bad, even if you were able to figure out where and how to send it. But it reduces

Well they are doing both of course, your patch will still get rejected if it's bad, even if you were able to figure out where and how to send it. But it reduces the amount of patches that need to be read and rejected. Also we are arguing backwards here. They don't make it intentionally hard to keep out new contributors, it's just not important in any way to make it simpler. The goal is to make it work best for the thousands of existing contributors, especially the gatekeeping subsystem maintainers.