Oh man, when I first started regularly contributing to open source, I had to make a patch and manually increment the numeric prefix when i committed it to a public cvs repository's patches directory.

Then I had to write an email to let people know about it.

That was followed by posting patches as attachments to issues on an issue queue, with no version control net on my side, unless you count committing CVS repositories into subversion.

OP just isn't aware of all the failed forks/patches because they were never as readily available and easy to merge before.