In my opinion, it's all market economics that decide how things work. The moment you introduce a complex courting procedure, where maintainers are required to be nice and acknowledge every little detail and guide the newbies through every half-baked contribution, you'll kill the project. That's because what keeps the maintainers and the senior contributing and maintaining is the technical work and not the human work. Most maintainers would rather spend their time exploring, contributing and doing technically useful stuff than making every newbies happy and welcome and teach ing them to be smarter and better developer. Such a project will automatically loose the ultra smart, self-driven people that keeps projects like the Linux kernel relevant for more than 30 years. It's all market economics.

No, it’s simple ethics and nothing more: credit where credit is due.

The maintainer said this guy ‘reported’ the bug when he’d actually diagnosed and fixed it. That was a mistake which the maintainer since apologized for, and the mistake could have been avoided without any additional time and effort on the maintainer’s part simply by using a more appropriate tag.

You are really going off into outer space with this stuff about ‘market economics’ and ‘complex courting rituals’. In my experience, whenever I need to make very complex and wide-ranging arguments to justify my behavior, it usually means that I’m the asshole.