It's really really hard to create a contribution system that works well when there is a large set of users, a large set of contributors, _and_ a tricky design space. It's tempting to become authoritarian, especially when the design space is complex and you've thought about it longer than anyone else. Inclusion is a shit ton of work, and a lot of it feels non-technical and boring to most people.
It's tempting to throw away compatibility and ask users to just deal with it. No project is perfect at this, but infrastructure stuff has a much higher bar for this than most other projects. That makes everything else that much harder.
Most tech culture undervalues management a lot, especially in open source. But open source should be valuing it more, because the problems are so much harder than in a small co-located one-company team -- communication is lower bandwidth and higher stakes, there's no way to manage other people's schedules, there's differing goals and incentives, and on and on.