Clearly this is evidence that those institutions are in need of improvement, no? Perhaps too few people know about them, for starters.

Or go with a distribution that makes it trivial to make drive-by contributions, like NixOS for example. Updating a package is a simple as bumping two lines and sending a pull request here: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs

For reference, I’m the (co)maintainer of over 80 packages in Nixpkgs. IIRC, I submitted my first PR within roughly a month of using NixOS. Before NixOS, I had used Ubuntu for 4 years. How many packages did I maintain there? Zero. It’s just too difficult to track down the right project, figure out the arcane build/packaging setup, contact the maintainers, etc.