[boredtofears]

Yeah, I kinda stopped involving myself in other people's OSS projects a while ago for that reason. If I have an itch to scratch, I just use my fork. It usually feels like my itch isn't theirs and I always feel like I'm imposing on the maintainer's vision or at best just taking time away from them. I think maintainers have a lot of pressure to accept things because "open source!".

[moraesc]

A couple questions here - would more clear guidelines in the CONTRIBUTING.md file help in clarifying project direction and what contributions would be most valuable? Is there a better way for projects to indicate what issues should be prioritized? Do you ever want to run your contribution ideas past a maintainer before opening up a PR and if so do you ever do that? I'm curious if your itch may actually be something they're looking for too but it's not made clear in an effective way.

[boredtofears]

To be honest, I didn't really think about the goals of the projects at all. I'm not even sure if a CONTRIBUTING.md existed. I just needed a particular feature for something I was working and it felt like "being a good OSS citizen" to at least offer it back to the maintainer, but I think I just ended up putting them in a position where they felt like they had to make it work.