Are you saying it is a "Leaky Egos" type of problem here? That the maintainers' egos are preventing new people from joining and helping out?
Let's just for the sake of argument say you read a "C for Dummies" book and actually write a few programs. OK now you are a beginner C developer with a small bit of experience under your belt. Now you need to read an Intermediate C book and learn data structures and algorithms that "C for Dummies" didn't teach you. Then you need to read a few Advanced C books to learn how to do system level programming, write your own libraries, hook into interrupts, link to binary libraries written in a different language, and learn how to program C to access operating system internals. After all that, you have to join some smaller level open source C projects, and then move up to medium level, and then finally to large level such as PHP.
Of course at that level, you got people just like you used to be giving you advice on how to do your job, and how to rewrite the program, but you are very busy trying to submit code to the project that is accepted by the maintainers and included in the main branch of code, and you have a few other maintainers telling you how bad your code is, and a few others telling you that your code conflicts with what they wrote. Of course the noobz don't know any of this, but you are frustrated, stressed out, and nobody is paying you any money to do this and you owe a lot of debt on your bills. So you get told "Well why don't you do more?" by a noob, in response to some feature they want you to add to the project, but you know that adding it will cause a lot of problems with the other programmers and maintainers, and also cause them to give you a lot of negative feedback for it.
You consider your options, you could just fork the PHP code into a different open source project, but then who would join you in on it? You could write an open letter to the PHP community about adding this feature and supporting the programmers and maintainers by donating money so they are able to spend extra weeks working on it and quit their jobs and start doing the project full-time. You could just hope that everyone sees it your way and works on adding this feature eventually. You could just give up in frustration and quit, citing family issues. You could talk negatively to the noob and hope he/she quits suggesting these features be added and tell him/her just how hard and complex that would be. You could do something else as well.
Let's just for the sake of argument say you read a "C for Dummies" book and actually write a few programs. OK now you are a beginner C developer with a small bit of experience under your belt. Now you need to read an Intermediate C book and learn data structures and algorithms that "C for Dummies" didn't teach you. Then you need to read a few Advanced C books to learn how to do system level programming, write your own libraries, hook into interrupts, link to binary libraries written in a different language, and learn how to program C to access operating system internals. After all that, you have to join some smaller level open source C projects, and then move up to medium level, and then finally to large level such as PHP.
Of course at that level, you got people just like you used to be giving you advice on how to do your job, and how to rewrite the program, but you are very busy trying to submit code to the project that is accepted by the maintainers and included in the main branch of code, and you have a few other maintainers telling you how bad your code is, and a few others telling you that your code conflicts with what they wrote. Of course the noobz don't know any of this, but you are frustrated, stressed out, and nobody is paying you any money to do this and you owe a lot of debt on your bills. So you get told "Well why don't you do more?" by a noob, in response to some feature they want you to add to the project, but you know that adding it will cause a lot of problems with the other programmers and maintainers, and also cause them to give you a lot of negative feedback for it.
You consider your options, you could just fork the PHP code into a different open source project, but then who would join you in on it? You could write an open letter to the PHP community about adding this feature and supporting the programmers and maintainers by donating money so they are able to spend extra weeks working on it and quit their jobs and start doing the project full-time. You could just hope that everyone sees it your way and works on adding this feature eventually. You could just give up in frustration and quit, citing family issues. You could talk negatively to the noob and hope he/she quits suggesting these features be added and tell him/her just how hard and complex that would be. You could do something else as well.