Yeah... that's not going happen. The community doesn't serve the developer, the developer serves himself/herself depending on the application. Though most developers are nice enough to make it easy to use and fix bugs as they are reported as well as take criticism into account But they're not going add a feature like portrait mode unless one of these 3 happens.

a) it's easy (aka it won't take them very much time)
b) they benefit from it (do they use portrait mode enough)
c) they get paid (self-explanatory)

There seems to be a wide range of types of developers though, from people who will be more than happy to implement what the community wants (depending on time). To developers who could give less a **** what you want and just do what they want. (e.g. Pidgin for a while). And at that time, the project just tends to fork and go down different paths.