The FAF community has always been conservative regarding changes that touch gameplay in any form. And parts of the community have always been rude, ignorant or lacking empathy with other people's opinions when discussing anything.
The "Grubby attitude" will never be the majority here. And FAF will never have a balance team that has enough authority and consensus-making ability to push through meta-changes in quick succession.
If think there is no choice than to accept this as fact. It might change in the future, but i doubt any single person can really impact this, and i also don't think it is necessary to be happy as a contributor / developer.
If a FAF contributor wants to make changes to FAF gameplay (even if they have a perfect technical solution), what they DO NOT necessarily have is community consensus.
Pushing things through without "enough" consensus is the path to burnout and unhappiness. If a contributor wants to keep having fun doing things around FAF, this is the one thing that they should not do. The technical solution that the contributor has built here does not really matter, other than that it works! It is the consensus that matters and the consensus alone that has the power to bring that change into standard gameplay in a way that everybody is happy with.
And here is in my opinion the common pitfall for contributors:
Contributors burn out trying to create consensus for their proposed change.
The reason for that is that trying to create consensus in a short amount of time is often practically impossible. No amount of playtesting, putting things into news, letting Gyle talk about them or making a forum posts will be able to convert a change from "controversial" to "generally looked forward to".
In my opinion, the only way to really do things happily is to do them primarily for yourself. Make a gameplay change that YOU want to play and play it together with people that also like it.
And i believe that good changes will eventually mature into having consensus to be put into the game (might take years but still). However, let other people argue for that. The contributor's job should then be to market whatever they made, so that other people can find it, but thats pretty much it.
This is for example how map generator got into ladder without a lot of problems. It took a lot of time, and in the eyes of many that is a good thing.
If a contributor absolutely wants to (and is motivated by) bringing changes to FAF quickly and in short succession, they must indeed only make absolutely uncontroversial changes (like the performance improvements).