The primary benefit of FOSS over proprietary software is, in fact, the ability and willingness to change things and open up changes to a wider pool of developers. Fiefdoms are actively hostile to open source principles. Obviously it's good to treat people with respect but you shouldn't let worse code win out just because of ego alone. Sometimes software gets forked or rewritten and sometimes the fork/rewrite wins out, that's evolution and competition and it keeps the ecosystem healthy.