For something like drivers most of them are probably from first time contributors, and they aren't really going to be hanging around for further contributions.

For something like drivers most of them are probably from first time contributors, and they aren't really going to be hanging around for further contributions. That's fine - the driver would improve if the contributions are accepted, and they don't touch core code that will break other things. But instead totally non-functional drivers are left languishing because PRs aren't merged. In the case of Sigrok the problem didn't seem so much the maintainers, but rather non-developers "triaging" PRs with unhelpful advice to split patches, when a lack of actual developers meant they'd never be looked at anyway. Otherwise a fork might have occurred rather than wasting everyone's time.