The example doesnt seem to support your argument. The rationale the developer gives here is reasonable and looks like good stewardship of a shared library - the patch added a new API that was tightly based on termites' needs and provided little benefit for other terminal programs. What the maintainer wanted was a more complete API for the feature. The termite dev said he did not want to implement this feature in the library. This is also reasonable. Its his code and his time. So we have two people who can't find/commit to a solution everyone is happy with. It doesn't really seem user hostile at all, just that something couldnt be worked out. Sure, its frustrating when its an app you really like, but sometimes interests wont align even when it seems from the outside like they should.
That reading doesn't really agree with the maintainers' responses at all.
They say this is desirable functionality, but that they would want to subsume termites features in VTE and Gnome Terminal, and that was their rationale for rejecting the patch. Then they didn't deliver those features in a timely fashion.
