Personal observations however: This used to be slightly different in late 1990s FLOSS community. At least with the advent of github, forking something huge or starting a new project from scratch on one's own (because why not) became much more attractive and common than collaboration and improvement of existing code. That's why now in virtually every field of software we have a plethora of half-baked stuff that just all too often lacks resources for maintenance, bugfixing, support.