As someone who belongs to the OSM community, I am sorry that you had this experience. Gatekeeping is an unfortunate byproduct of a crowdsourcing project, it see

As someone who belongs to the OSM community, I am sorry that you had this experience. Gatekeeping is an unfortunate byproduct of a crowdsourcing project, it seems. I hope you reconsider and try again. Many of us are actually here to help.