I have many such forks myself. Some are totally different from upstream now, and yet improvements that upstream makes are straightforwardly portable. I just point Opus 5.5 at the repo; describe what I want; et voila.

In the past, communities were required to produce the rest of these things. Now we live in an era of unprecedented free software. Soon no one will even be able to lock us out of firmware and all software will be free as in free speech to all.