Preventing another migration is a cost reduction in itself
Yeah I can really get in there and spend 2 years ripping the horrible UI out, then have to run a fork because it's not of interest to the maintainers and will never be merged.
At that point I'll just use MS office. Costs me 10 minutes salary a month.
Add to that an infinite stream of bug reports and feature requests, and it gets tiring. I don't even have the time to answer all bug reports...
But I still did not contribute, because their understanding of a good UI was not what I had in mind.
They are office people.
(At least at that time, but I don't think that changed)
And I was used to how graphical design software worked. I would have had to fork and that was out of my scope.
On the backend while writing macros you discover a lot of...interesting choices
Like how sometimes my macros failed because it does not interface with the regional formatting of the system (had to take 0.34 and convert it to 0,34 by converting it to string). The reverse is not necessary.
How value and value2 exists as property of a cell (I will bet whatever you want that it was a temporary name) and how the "value" behavior is dogshit.
How stuff is hyper advanced but stuff that SHOULD work does not....
It's an interesting look at it.
Sometimes no amount or organising or doing the work yourself can move things forward appreciably.
A faff, of course, but perhaps a better deal than contributing monetarily to Microsoft to have Copilot shoved in your face instead of the features you actually want.