The Drupal community & maintainers are awesome. Questions may be ignored for months and there's no way to actually push your patches into a module if the module owner has decided he doesn't have time to work on it anymore.
Same thing has happened with the Advanced cache module. This module rocks when it comes to caching your data in Drupal 5. I've never seen such a performance increase with any other module that doesn't rely on third party software (think memcache, sphinx, ...).
