Thats something that someone who hasn't contributed to an open source piece of software says. The reality is it's a nightmare. I've made hundreds of pull requests, patches via email over the years and the accept rate is around 5%. Most are ignored, deleted or closed silently or result in a flame war because some little big man's ego has been damaged by the idea that someone wants to contribute. So I gave up, maintain patch forks of some things we use.
I had the same experience contributing to Wikipedia. Naively, I thought it'd be cool to contribute to something I've found so very useful. So I rewrote an article to be more unbiased, clarified a few things and removed other ambiguous things without sources. Within a day, the whole thing was fully reverted by the original author. I've tried rewriting my contribution a couple of times in various ways, but most of it was trashed within hours.
It seems authors appropriate certain articles and will not accept any contribution or change to their work. This guy was also part of a group that considers itself guardian of the subject, which may contribute to a sense of entitlement and a lack of acceptance of any other contributions. That's been the first and last time I ever tried contributing anything to Wikipedia, other than fixing a few typos.
Sadly, it seems open source also has this problem. Ideas and project are split into myriad fractions, each of which compete but often do the same thing. Most of them do not have enough momentum to produce well rounded products, leading to a huge mass of not very amazing software and hardware products or, if there is some momentum, a dazzling array of alternatives with little differences between them. Long term support also is often very shaky. Ego seems to be a large part of that. Rather than working in the service of another, people would rather fork and do something themselves, even though the end product suffers. Disagreements also often seem to be 'resolved' by forking, rather than working things out together. That's a bit like taking the ball and going home, except that the ball gets copied. Due to the many competing opinions and no one to sign off on decisions, projects often are a jumbled mess of ideas and strategies.
Don't get me wrong, I really appreciate the concept and philosophy of the open source community and am happily using various products that have resulted from it, but there are a few serious issues that cause the whole effort to be much less fruitful than it could be.