This is hard to get right. Personally I try not to be a grumpy maintainer but I'm frequently a picky one. Lately I've been an absent one. I think maintainers c

This is hard to get right. Personally I try not to be a grumpy maintainer but I'm frequently a picky one. Lately I've been an absent one. I think maintainers can frequently come across as grumpy simply because their goals are different from contributors. They have to live in and fix the codebase for the long term, so have a proportionally higher stake in consistency while also having a much broader knowledge of the rest of the code. It's hard not to nitpick in this situation. For the contributor, they're frequently trying to get some other work done and would rather not have endless back and forth over the precise detail. Furthermore their feature or bugfix is clearly a good idea because it solves their own problem. A problem that, unfortunately, the maintainer doesn't have. Perhaps a partial solution is in treating project maintainership itself as an engineering problem. That is, having automated testing infrastructure, developer tooling for code consistency, etc. This kind of stuff has become dramatically easier to set up for small open source projects, but depending on the language it can still be a lot of effort.