Agreed. This will probably end up being a net positive for the Terraform 'concept' and its relatives.
> My attempts to submit Pull Requests for much wanted features (fully working documentation with new integration tests all passing) often took months-a year to be accepted and merged.
Isn't this always going to be the case?
Honestly, are you signing up to maintain the feature long-term? Fix bugs? Update documentation? Review PRs with small changes to the feature?
The cost of accepting a PR can be much higher than the cost of creating the PR.
Even if you promise to maintain it! What if you don't? What recourse does the maintainers have? They can't just remove your feature, since customers started using it and you don't want to announce breaking changes and scare everybody.
If you're building an open source product with lots of users, where compatibility is important. Then accepting a PR is a huge liability, you'll always want to be extremely conservative about it.
A PR is not always a gift, regardless of innocent it looks.
Hashicorp engineers were incentivized to work on features related to Hashicorp paid services, and Hashicorp competitors who would similarly benefit from a stronger Terraform codebase were disincentivized from potentially helping Hashicorp.