until now all contributions were first sent to core and Luke would merge them to knots. But recent core attitude of rejecting patches that would make forking easier means in future, things may change and devs will be encouraged to directly push patches to knots.

I am personally working on creating a consensus only lib which will be same code base as core but this will allow easier integration of polyglot clients. This way we only "agree" on consensus code and can have our own mempool/wallet etc implementation. people can then choose any non-consensus related implementations and all use the same consensus implementation. I have started looking at the libbitcoinkernel project

This will make maintaining much easier..