I fully understand that I may be completely wrong but I just dont see that a lot of effort comes from outside a projects core maintainers. Its always a core maintainer group usually paid by some company doing 95% of the work and the patches contributed are localizations, small bug fixes and weird edge cases.

I'm not an open source maintainer so I could be completely off base here.

This perception comes from a high amount of trust required to take big submissions; If I know and trust the submitter, I'm more willing to accept a bigger patch. If you really want to contribute big changes to a project, it usually involves communicating with the core maintainers a lot, and essentially becoming one of them. Pion/webrtc is my favorite example of a project with a maintainer group who are employed by many different companies. Sean Dubois is the primary maintainer of that project, and does a good job of welcoming people into the fold.