Openness in general requires a large learning curve, and I think it's a mistake for any open source project to be marketing itself as a democratic entity that literally anyone can contribute to. If anything, open source is more like a technocratic government (ergo the "Benevolent Dictator For Life" position in a project). Even Wikipedia is a huge pain in the ass to add to at this point.

I've noticed a similar phenomenon with the open science movement, where scientists publicly release their data. Unsurprisingly, few folks from the general public usually work with open data with the necessary assumptions to draw valid conclusions from it. Other scientists, as insiders who've built up decades worth of expertise in statistics and other analytical techniques (at least in theory; in practice not always) are usually the only people who have the ability to fully milk the data for what it's worth. Science, however, is possibly even slower and more political than linux kernel development, although I don't have enough knowledge to make a proper comparison.

These are all pretty well documented tasks. It might not be 'one button simple' like a gitlab merge request, but I thought it was pretty easy overall. It did take some time investment on my part to learn the submission steps (about a weekend total, including the compiling and testing locally).

> Large and/or controversial changes ...

I suspect if they are large or controversial, that in itself implies the barrier to merging is going to be higher. How many new contributors (non-paid contributors especially) want to merge something controversial on the first go?

Could it be simpler? Possibly. Sometimes complex systems do require complex processes for maintenance. I'm just saying I didn't think it was especially burdensome to contribute a small change as a brand-new, completely-unassisted by another person (before sending patch) contributor.