Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you've ever tried to contribute something to the Linux kernel you'd know it's not an easy process. They say that they want to "encourage new contributors to repeatedly contribute". So in this respect it is very different from the Linux kernel. I have contributed a small 1-time change to the Linux kernel. It was relatively easy and straight forward; I sent my first patch to the wrong list, but the maintainers hel…
I think you're forgetting the large learning curve to get to that point. You learned how to build the kernel, git, the kernel style guide, signed-off-bys, checkpatch, get-maintainer and finally running git-email. And there's the assumption that you knew what to change and how to fix it, but most kernel error messages are opaque - it can often be impossible to find out why a system call returns -EINVAL or where an err…
Openness in general requires a large learning curve, and I think it's a mistake for any open source project to be marketing itself as a democratic entity that literally anyone can contribute to. If anything, open source is more like a technocratic government (ergo the "Benevolent Dictator For Life" position in a project). Even Wikipedia is a huge pain in the ass to add to at this point.
I've noticed a similar phenomenon with the open science movement, where scientists publicly release their data. Unsurprisingly, few folks from the general public usually work with open data with the necessary assumptions to draw valid conclusions from it. Other scientists, as insiders who've built up decades worth of expertise in statistics and other analytical techniques (at least in theory; in practice not always) are usually the only people who have the ability to fully milk the data for what it's worth. Science, however, is possibly even slower and more political than linux kernel development, although I don't have enough knowledge to make a proper comparison.