The mistake is thinking it's about power. It's about aligning goals. A lot of the individual motivation for OSS is about making the world (what the developer believes is) a better place. Things that contribute to that vision are welcome; things that distract from it are not. The first category includes detailed bug reports and feature requests consistent with the software's existing direction. The second includes vague bug reports and requests for features that the developers don't believe in. Try demanding that security software should include a back door and see what kind of reception that gets.

The problem isn't that asking developers to do things for you is rude by itself. You can ask politely, they can decline politely, end of story. It's not even that pestering developers after such a refusal is rude, even though that's obviously the case. The problem is that such an approach isn't very effective. If you can convince the developers that fixing your problem is consistent with their own vision of how to make the project fulfill its existing goals, that's much more effective than mere badgering. If you want someone to do something for you, in any context, it's better to have them think of you as a collaborator than as someone who just makes demands.