Earlier quoted context omitted.
95% of the patches __are__ bugfixing. New features are pretty rare. We're mostly volunteers, so people implement whatever they feel like doing :-) The essence of open-source. Come help out if you can, or sponsor some fixes with one of the LibreOffice consulting companies.
"We're mostly volunteers, so people implement whatever they feel like doing :-) The essence of open-source." I am extremely appreciative of what open-source developers do. One only has to look at the Linux ecosystem to see how much work they've contributed—and of course there's much more than just that. What you say is obvious, volunteers are unlikely do work they do not like and I'd certainly not expect them to do s…
Hopefully you will be happy to hear that a company has funded some improvements to that part of the code, and those improvements should roll out over the current and the next release.
ODT files are theoretically human-editable, because once you expand the file (using e.g. unzip) you have a small set of XML files, which can be edited as text and then wrapped up into an ODT again.
Finding "corruption" is not really a thing (at least for writer documents), the spec for writer documents is sufficiently complex that parts of it are in conflict with itself, and compromise solutions must be found in the code.
The writer code to lay the document out is sufficiently complex that it has multiple chunks of guard code specifically designed to make it give up when it cannot make reasonable progress.