In theory you are correct, but in my practical experience, I've found that the ratio does in fact convey quality quite strongly. The original motivation behind

In theory you are correct, but in my practical experience, I've found that the ratio does in fact convey quality quite strongly. The original motivation behind this project was this: I wrote a script to take a screenshot of my desktop every 10 seconds and upload them to S3. I used boto to do the uploading (https://github.com/boto/boto https://github.com/boto/boto). Boto leaked memory and eventually the background script would cause my laptop to crash. When I figured out the problem I noticed boto has a large number of open issues (http://repoq.com/boto/boto http://repoq.com/boto/boto). This indicates that the project is not well maintained. Obviously this is not a perfect heuristic. But it's a lot better than one might think.