I totally want to become a Linux contributor one day. I made drivers for some USB stuff on my laptop but I got the impression the kernel developers prefer keeping that stuff in user space if at all possible and in my case it was.

That's awesome. Don't discount your contribution just because it didn't make its way into the kernel. Published FOSS is great too. If you want to reach more users by default, you could ask Ubuntu or Red Hat to include it in their distros. Thanks for the work!