Of course I understand you are not complaining about me, but that does not stop me from trying to force my perspectives on you 
I think you are whining and there is nothing to whine about. I understand the point that it is not tempting to put a lot of effort into for instance fixing a bug that you know BenF has fixed already when you do not know if he is going to release that fix soon or not. But if people are too unclear and do not communicate, just ignore them. They may have their reasons, and they probably have heard your position so you are not going to change them. So move on. Maybe they will change, but do not wait for that.
It was asked, is the firmware open source or not? Well, open source is what you see, and the one you see is open source. The one you don’t see is per definition not open source. Maybe it will be one day. But for whatever reasons it is closed, and I don’t think it is just because not enough people ask for it. So ignore it.
Remember when BenF released v3 as open source. Then the latest and greatest version was open source, but still the masses did not jump on board with patches and development. So the point of “the open source version is too old” is moot.
Why does the lack of “official repo” stop you from publishing your patches? You think Seeed will do separate, parallel development and your work will be in vain? You do not want to use gitorious? That I will take down my repo and delete your hard drive? 