It's also unnerving that there are huge projects (not just Linux) and huge operating systems that have sections that are "Subsystem maintainer/author or nobody.

It's also unnerving that there are huge projects (not just Linux) and huge operating systems that have sections that are "Subsystem maintainer/author or nobody." Open source projects get volunteers because volunteers find the work interesting and some esoteric parts can have very, very few people working on them. I don't really have a solution to this, but it's to be expected.