> If I become away that upstream wants it I'm happy to put in the work to get a clean merge, but I'm not wasting anymore time pushing things upstream without some indicator that my time is valued by them. Been burned too many time now.

Do you realize that all the major package system on BSD and Linux works that way. You take upstream, patch it to get it to compile on the system, and then build a package. That is what open source is about. It's not about building a community and what's not.