I honestly don't see how politeness factors into this (but I definitely think the maintainers were polite enough in this case). The person who submitted this c

I honestly don't see how politeness factors into this (but I definitely think the maintainers were polite enough in this case). The person who submitted this code went out on a limb and implemented something without talking to the maintainers first. That's completely fine. I'm sure they learned quite a bit by implementing it. That's a win by itself. It's the getting upset that it didn't get integrated that I think is unreasonable. The maintainers donate their time to write and curate code to make progress on their vision of the software. Submitting code like this (not talking beforehand) is like giving a friend who likes photography a camera without asking what they want. There's a chance they love it, but there's a good chance they wont. If you care about getting one outcome over another, you need to communicate beforehand.