Trust me when I say I know where you're coming from. Appreciation -- or the lack of thereof -- is pretty essential for a FOSS developer developing stuff on their spare time. If you're going to spend a decent amount of your time on writing something for the benefit of the community, the "greater good", so to say, you'd expect them to have the decency to say "thank you" when you're handing out all the code and the documentation to them for free, right?
Well, all too often people are unable to even do that, for whatever reason(s). But even so, chances are that by making something available as free and open source software, you've already changed the world -- for better.

jonwil, I'd say that you're a very valued member of this community and many of us admire your work, as we know we're unlikely to ever achieve your level of skill and knowledge. Reverse engineering is no child's play, and despite my interest in programming and mobile platforms, I can safely say I'm not capable of doing ARM reverse-engineering; and given that the majority of non-mobile devices use x86 CPUs, finding an ARM reverse-engineer is likely a lot harder than an x86 one.

Unlike Android, Sailfish OS or the like, Maemo no longer has any major sponsors and this probably explains why there's no Game Boy Color emulator for Maemo, for example. But despite such minor shortcomings, Maemo is probably the best mobile OS I've ever used and the Nokia N900 is a strong candidate for "best mobile phone made so far".

Looking at the wiki page for "Fremantle closed packages", I'd say there's plenty of things to do for the Maemo platform in order to further improve it and make Fremantle Freemantle in order to support projects like Neo900 and whatnot. As Estel already mentioned, getting involved with Maemo development is hard and there just isn't enough manpower. It can be and likely is discouraging at times, but for what it's worth, I hope you won't quit your awesome reverse-engineering efforts or the Maemo community anytime soon.