How recently was that? They made a big public effort during the Drupal 8 project to become more open, welcoming, and responsive, and it would interesting to know if that made a difference.
My most recent interaction with the Drupal community was today. I finally got a response on a couple of patches I submitted a few weeks ago (one committed, one got useful feedback, which is great!), and I followed up on a patch that I'd contributed that someone else used and found to resolve their problem (but still has no response from the maintainer, after a few weeks), and checked on that core include patch, which has no reply, even though I submitted a patch against D8 in hopes of getting a reply (I figured maybe all the core people were bored of Drupal 6 and Drupal 7).
So, no. The recent push hasn't changed much in my experience. It could just be bad luck, and my own inability to spend more time on the problem of introducing myself or being involved. Drupal will never be my core job or something I can spend significant time on. But, I've never had such a hard time getting feedback on patches before, with any still active project I can think of, and I've been submitting little patches and making bug reports against OSS projects for a long time.
If Drupal has a welcoming and helpful community I've had trouble finding where they hang out. It is definitely not in their issue tracker.
I am sorry. The issue tracker is a really vast place and it is indeed not the best place to start. I would recommend https://www.drupal.org/core-office-hours for example. However: right now is perhaps not the best time, we just had Drupal 8 out and everyone is resting. And there's Thanksgiving and then Christmas upcoming. I am in #drupal-migrate on freenode, however , very very often and looking for contributors to that effort :) #drupal-contribute is a good place too, it might look quiet now but try saying the magic words "I am new here and I'd like to contribute". Sooner or later (again, it's thanksgiving weekend) those words will conjure a welcoming guide :)
I think this may be where part of the breakdown comes in. I don't want to be a "Drupal developer", don't want to devote huge amounts of time to the project (though I may release a couple of modules of the stuff I develop for my own use at some point), and don't necessarily want a guide (though someone that answers my questions about the incredibly complex abstractions in Drupal would certainly be helpful, I don't believe I'm entitled to such).
I want to fix bugs and add missing functionality that prevent me from launching my site, send the patches to fix those bugs to the people who maintain the component or module, and then move on to the next problem in my deployment. When I send those patches in, it's because I hope to never have to deal with the problem again. I've been casually poking my head into Drupal every now and then for years. I'd almost be willing to say the problem of casual contribution is worse than it was, say, 7 years ago.
That sort of casual contribution has rarely been an issue in the past with other projects; I've got patches in dozens, maybe hundreds, of OSS projects at this point. I don't mean to overvalue it and say this is priceless knowledge I'm imparting. Often it's just a couple of lines of code or a documentation correction, but each one adds up to a slightly better project. And, it's kinda how this stuff is supposed to work. Enough eyes makes all bugs shallow, that kind of thing. If I have to maintain a custom fork of several modules, and a piece of core, just to keep my site going, my experience becomes drastically less pleasant, and my reasons for using Drupal become less compelling. Much of the automation I have in place for staying on top of updates and such breaks down at that point.
I'm sounding grumpier about it than I actually am, probably, as I don't begrudge anyone not doing something for free. I'm happy to have all of these components that mostly work well together, and do useful stuff, for free. And, I'm willing to put in the work to make it suit my needs. But, when I see the suggestion that it's an excellent example of a helpful community, I have to take exception, as it's definitely not been my experience. Drupal forums and ticket tracker responses can be downright dismissive, at times, particularly when someone is coming from another system or framework and doesn't understand the Drupal jargon (which is vast, confusing, and often weird).
Again: I am sorry. This is something the project needs to figure out: how do you deal with thousands upon thousands of issues? Just of major issues there are more than a thousand! So if you post a random patch the chances are , alas, very high it'll be lost in this vast sea. Again: this is not ideal, hopefully we will figure something out.
Believe me, I'm sympathetic. I work on a project with a million or so users, and a very small team supporting it. I'll try to find ways to follow up more directly on stuff like this. As I said, IRC (and the specific IRC channels of the modules I use, like drupal-commerce) has been occasionally helpful, and can occasionally nudge someone into looking at my tickets/patches. I've got a handful of new patches that I'd like to submit, will try to follow up more directly with the relevant devs, rather than just dropping them in the issue tracker and forgetting about them.
And this is where being a contributor pays off: if $random_guy comes in and says hey look at this patch, people might or might not and it might get in or might not. It's an entirely different thing when someone we know does the same, for so many reasons. One, there's the whole karma thing. Second, if I know this is not your first rodeo then I will be much more willing to invest my time in it (hint: time is the scarce resource hence the currency in open source world) because I'll know you already have coding standards, obvious API usage etc down pat.
You need to give us a chance to be friendly. If you a drop a patch in a queue which has 10K other patches and then, as you said, move on then the chances of this patch being picked up is quite low.
