as a volunteer contributor, I will say that landing changes & adding features can take a lot of time, not always in just active work, so patience is a must. (e.g., it's not uncommon for me to be rebasing a 6 month old branch because it wasn't mergeable or reviewable at the time but now is)
The other side of that is funding, where you have to really work to bring in enough money to support yourself, no easy feat.