The one and only reason people don't fix shit is because:
>1. It takes a long ass time to learn a codebase in 2020. Have you seen the absurd LOC in modern projects?
>2. Projects are not documented enough to be openly hackable
>3. Nobody enjoys trying to make sense of C codebases with a thousand imported header files and single-letter variables, specially when they are not well commented.
>4. Some developers have some loud and ass-backwards opinions and they will reject your patches because of some vague notions about hoe it doesn't fit the project's philosophy. People are afraid of having their efforts thrown away due to some dude's ego.
Open development suffers from the gigantic autism of the average developer. Hackable software needs some extensive documentation and not many programmers are up to that task, which causes people to be afraid of diving deep into it.