You can't make a rocket scientist just by giving them carte blanche to play with rockets. I definitely appreciate the empowering aspects of open commit policies

You can't make a rocket scientist just by giving them carte blanche to play with rockets. I definitely appreciate the empowering aspects of open commit policies, but I'm less concerned with getting contributions than I am with getting good contributions. We've even added some committers prematurely over the years...and those came after months of patches and PRs. The primary bottom line for a larger or more established project is maintaining code quality, stability, predictability of behavior...all while still moving forward with new features. When you endeavor to achieve those goals in every commit, giving any PR-sender the keys to the castle doesn't seem like such a great idea. As I mentioned elsewhere (and to you in discussions about open commit policies), I also don't feel like there's a good reason when Github makes it so easy to fork projects. We've worked with some folks for years off forks. I'm also not thrilled with the idea that you're going to get good developers if your developers only "really" started contributing once they got a commit bit. Just because someone's excited to drive a race car doesn't mean they're qualified.