If you can get a discussion going with the maintainer, which is not a guarantee (cant speak to libre maintainers, but I know other projects like this), then you have to convince them that your change is both valuable and reasonable for them to maintain. The latter part there is key - they are _maintain_ers. You write the code once and then run off. If you write some new UI in some fancy framework then they have to live with it forever and learn a new framework to support it. Its a big cost for them, so on smaller projects maintainers can get defensive/grumpy

As such a maintainer: you hit the nail on the head.

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...

Yes. Lucky if you even get noticed.

I talked once to the OpenOffice maintainers (there was no LibreOffice yet) - they were really open for contributions.

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.