This belief that there's one blessed version of any open source project is common, but pointless. I have contributed to dozens of other people's repos. As a ru

This belief that there's one blessed version of any open source project is common, but pointless. I have contributed to dozens of other people's repos. As a rule, I make a change, share it back, but run my own fork. Later if they merge my change, great, I can point back at upstream. But it's no big deal to have your own version -- that's part of the strength of open source. People get bent out of shape over whether upstream will merge their change, and I've heard people complain that they "wasted" their time making a change that's not accepted. But that's silly -- if you wanted the code, it wasn't a waste. Run it. Git also makes it really easy to maintain your own changeset over time even as you incorporate upstream changes. It's pretty much designed with that use case specifically in mind. It's wonderful when project maintainers are responsive and work to incorporate every good-faith improvement. That's the ideal. But it's also fine to fork when they simply can't or won't keep up. On many occasions I have also merged other people's lingering/rejected pull requests into my own fork. The project maintainer doesn't have to be the final arbiter.