It's not an easy task indeed, but it's very feasible. We have some examples of that kind. Firefox' fork PaleMoon is doing well, thanks to individual efforts of

It's not an easy task indeed, but it's very feasible. We have some examples of that kind. Firefox' fork PaleMoon is doing well, thanks to individual efforts of approximately one man. RedHat used to backport a ton of features to their Linux kernels across the major version numbers.