Jokes aside, I'm sure it's quite possible to work with them, if you know what you're doing, and more importantly, you're willing to work to a high standard.

A lot of the time, the second point isn't something that people realise. They do something to add/change a pet point of theirs, which is great (scratch the itch and all), but to make that palatable to other people, you need to understand that your itch needs to apply to everyone else, too.

An example from my own personal experience was many years ago when I wanted a patch to fix an issue I encountered with an IRC client. I sent it in, and it didn't make it in. I realise (with hindsight) that my solution fixed *my* case but broke other cases, and that's why it wasn't acceptable.

Not everyone has standards that are that high, but to be honest, for something as critical as the library so much software is developed on (Qt) or something like the kernel which is even more mission critical, I'm willing to accept that there *will* be a few hoops to jump through if I want to get my itch scratched.