Definitely got sympathy for that position. Upstreaming changes often takes a long time to get across context, get community buy in to changes, get approval cut

Definitely got sympathy for that position. Upstreaming changes often takes a long time to get across context, get community buy in to changes, get approval cut a release, whereas internally, it's often just a code review, which can be prioritised according to business needs. It's quite common for long standing forks to exist, where changes get pushed upstream from the fork, and the fork gets periodically re-cut.