A very interesting read, thank you for posting! It's cool to see how the Ionic team has worked around the limitations of Github's platform; stepped up and built something useful, rather than complain about it! I like the work ethic.

One side thing that I did want to touch upon was their use of their Ionitron bot to handle "dicey" situations when dealing with other users. Is it really that big of deal telling folks on the internet potentially bad news? So their Pull Request was denied/closed for some reason. Who the hell cares if they throw a temper tantrum? They're nothing more than a username on the Web to the rest of us. As long as the maintainers act with poise and integrity (and I've no reason to think that the Ionic team doesn't do that already) then they'll only be looked at in a favorable light.