The author sounds like he actually responds to feature requests, though. Typical behavior I'm seeing is that the maintainer just never checks the issue tracker, or has it disabled, but is more likely to read PR's.

As it should be. Issues are a dime a dozen, sometime coherent, rarely relevant. There is no barrier to submitting a garbage issue.

PRs, at the very least, provide a quality gate. You have to a) express the idea in runnable code and b) pass the tests.