People have a finite slice of their life to give you for nothing. Putting specific suggestions on the issue tracker seems more respectful of their time.
Attention and stewardship are not universal.
1. "This one issue is what is stopping me from using this product. Is this current method preferred by your users or do you have any other reason to not want to change?"
2. "The proprietary solution costs $X per month. Is there any way to sponsor development? I am willing to give $X/n (where n is whatever number you are comfortable with) per month to get this issue merged and to have some sort of prioritization when triaging issues.
3. Failing those: write a blog post and propose a fork. This is usually the quickest way to get a reaction from narcissistic developers.
Depends on the PR. Bugfixes sure, but new features mean more work for the maintianer in the future.
Speaking as a project maintainer that is starting to see some traction: I'd love to see people coming with PRs for features. It would mean a big amount of validation.
I bought a Mac and use Lightroom and I’m happy to give them both my money.
I'm sorry you did not stumble into them, but instead in the few hostile ones. It's a pity that made you give up.
A general tip, I give to people wishing to contribute to OSS is to first watch from the sideline. Read issues, threads, subscribe to an ML etc. Then to ask. Don't just throw in PR or feature request, but ask: is this welcome? How do you work? Any particular details that you wish me to pay extra attention to (tabs, spaces, tests, documentation, design).
As a FLOSS maintainer myself, it can be very intimidating to have someone throw a PR at you that rewrites everything (it comes across as: you suck, your software sucks, but watch me fix all that), or that disregards things that I deem critical (tests, architecture) It is really hard to review it, without coming across as an arrogant bastard. And often software that I put on a back burner will require me significant effort to get back into. So merging a simple typo fix or dependency update might cost half a day, just to get the dev env back up.
Hey dudes, there's a pointer dereferencing crash here which occurs when I do X, Y then Z. Added one line change to fix it. SILENCE.
There are no test cases for most projects either.
I reported this issue on irc years ago and the dev response was so hostile I abandoned trying to use it and never looked back. I pay Adobe $500/year for software that had been tested by users with developers silently watching.