Usually better start with small scale fixing typos and improving docs. That’s great canary for me. If it’s accepted within day or so, that’s project which I willing to learn. I would say you can select projects for your value and you would be fine contributing there. Eventually people will learn you and will trust you more
I understand your point and it's good advice. Typos and documentation though? That's boring... I want to do interesting things. Ever wondered why some program can't do something? Surely someone much smarter would have thought of it, right? And then you code it up and it actually works? That's the kind of thing I like to do.
I once tried to retrofit a library system into GNU bash of all things. Let's just say it didn't go well.
Your patch sounds horrible, no wonder people reject them.
Works for me. I can easily organize and reuse functions now. Made scripting much more pleasant. Even made a package out of it so I could install it alongside the upstream version.