The problem I see with allowing PRs but not issues (or locking the reporting of them behind a paywall) would be that there is no way for someone to discuss poss

The problem I see with allowing PRs but not issues (or locking the reporting of them behind a paywall) would be that there is no way for someone to discuss possible implementation details without having already potentially have gone down the "wrong" path and wasted time (i.e. Maintainer won't accept the PR without a significant rewrite), or spent money to discuss it when they already plan to contribute time and code to solve their own use case.