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.
Thanks Woodrow :)
Accepting 'Big Changes' from people is VERY frustrating. These thoughts run through my head.
* Idea is usually good! Even if I don't understand it could help lots of others users.
* The contributor is very focused on just getting their feature in. The impact on the larger project isn't as much a concern.
* New contributors often don't have the grit to see it out. They will disappear before things are done. So I am left picking up the pieces (which is harder then doing it all myself)
----
What I try and remember is that their happiness/experience matters more then any code. I try to help the contributor learn/grow as much as possible and even see some career benefits out of it. Pion will cease to matter eventually, so I hope to help as many programmers with it as possible.