Glad to see other ideas and operating models being proposed and tried. Most of us live in countries where you need money to pay rent and buy food. Unless you're already wealthy, that means you need to work (trade time for money) or find a way to trade time for an ownership stake that will, you hope, generate income (and in the process that stake becomes itself more valuable). A buddy of mine in a maintainer for a pop…
Reviewing and either accepting or rejecting (in full, no need to cherry-pick) large PR's is entirely up to the author. You were right; the safest way is to simply ask if they're willing to sponsor that custom work, and how would they like to be credited for their sponsorship. There's no need to go crazy about it. If it's not a right fit for the project or too much effort for the maintainer, then they can pay or it wi…
The problem comes that, as with many things, people like to live others' values for them. People become unreasonable. My friend was worried that he'd lose the respect, unreasonably in my view, of the community for not doing the "right thing", which in his view was dealing with a feature and set of PRs that were not on the roadmap to happen just now. And that word "sell out" - his word - for asking to be paid for his time was the root fear.