Everyone's saying it's too hard to learn a codebase and fix something.

This is not always true. In the case of small issues or typos, I can often jump into a well organized but completely unfamiliar codebase, find what I'm looking for an fix it in a matter of minutes.

The real time sink is getting a compatible dev environment spun up, downloading the code, setting up a test environment, packaging the fix, figuring out the guidelines for change submission and dealing with the dev team. This stuff can take hours for something that could be 5 min.

Tools like github can streamline some of this. What we really need is a one click dev and test environment setup option. Then my 5 min. fix would take maybe 5 min. of my time. If the team has good automated testing, it could also save them time on the review side. Getting all this to work would be a huge task, but could massively improve community participation and let open source devs focus on more important tasks.