Yes that's true. But by accepting an unusual patch you could also risk having a feature that doesn't fit in well with the rest of the project, breaks something

Yes that's true. But by accepting an unusual patch you could also risk having a feature that doesn't fit in well with the rest of the project, breaks something unexpected in another area of the project, takes up a lot of maintainer time that could be spent on other things, could break further in the future and need to be removed, which would further upset the users... So it's a trade-off that every project must decide to make in their own way. AFAIK it's not possible for a project to bend to every potential contributor's will, else the project drifts into the old unmaintainable big ball of mud. If you knew a way to develop software like that where everyone could get their way all the time, please let me know, we could turn that into a product and get really rich selling it to every software company.