I used to maintain a small patch set of issues that affected me and were fixed on the GNOME bugzilla but ignored by main devs. This is was a motivating factor in my switch to to Unity years ago. Sad to hear this situation hasn't improved.

I don't want to agree with you, but I tried to make a few polishing contributions to GNOME games and they got ignored after the first developer response (they told me what to fix, I fixed it). They've been stagnant for over 3 years now.

Submitting changes and having them accepted by GNOME is an exercise in futility if you aren't a GNOME dev.