It's analogous to the way that software companies train junior engineers: it takes time to define the tasks, set up infrastructure and tests to make development

It's analogous to the way that software companies train junior engineers: it takes time to define the tasks, set up infrastructure and tests to make development easy, review and provide feedback on contributions, and to encourage learning and further skill development. While open source communities have been around for a while, we're entering an era where the size of the community is scaling up significantly (thanks to GitHub and improved connectivity worldwide), and this is exposing some of the entrenched issues around the maintainer burden you mention, gatekeeping, and project maturity. There's a huge opportunity here to create an improved learning, accreditation and contribution ecosystem; one project I'd heard about recently in the UK is 'Code Grades'[0], which aims to provide a learning ladder for developers - whether they intend to code professionally or as a hobby. There's always going to be a requirement to define tasks and review contributions - the trick will be to spread the load and make consensus-gathering more straightforward, while also preventing accidental & malicious bad actors (reputation and accreditation can probably help get some of the way there). [0] - https://codegrades.com https://codegrades.com