But in the end, I am not talking about the devops around the application. The only opinion that really matters there is the one coming from the project owner.
Your obvious attempt straw-man is nothing but opaque.
What I am attempting to discuss are features for the application that the owner refuses to implement because "get out".
Had Linus said that to the first person who emailed him about building an init daemon, I don't think many people would have paid much attention to Linux.
You say "see ...", but I've already commented on that comment.
Your analogy with Torvalds isn't that relevant. Building an init daemon didn't conflict with the long-term goals, and the advantages are reasonably clear.
Consider the FOQ "Why is Taskwarrior written in C++ and not something hackable".
We can construct a similar question to pose to Torvalds - "Why is git written in C and not a more modern language like C++?"
We know what Torvalds thinks of C++ ("C++ is a horrible language") and of that proposal.
If he ignored or blew off the first email to suggest rewriting git in C++ then we know exactly where git would be.
This demonstrates that your argument concerning "can you implement X, Y, and Z for me, it would make my life much better" has little predictive or even explanatory power.
"But in the end, I am not talking about the devops around the application. The only opinion that really matters there is the one coming from the project owner.
Your obvious attempt straw-man is nothing but opaque."
I am simply addressing the section about the feature requests.
You on the other hand are painting my argument as something it is not about.
Edit: By features I mean anything under "Why Didn't You Implement My Favorite Feature?"
"Can you switch from Atlassian to the Github issue tracker? That would be so much better for me.
"Can you switch from a custom CI solution to Travis? That would be so much better for me."
Then two years later someone comes along and says:
"Can you rewrite the documentation in reStructuredText instead of Markdown? That would be so much better for me."
"Can you switch from git to mercurial? That would be so much better for me."
And so on.
When does the madness stop?