You actually bring up a good point, the webkit inspector right now is tied to the webkit project, and the barrier to contribution is prohibitively high. I've suggested to Paul Irish separating the two projects and making them more independent, though I'm not sure what the feasibility of that is.

I can either try to submit a patch and likely fail, or blog about it. Last time I complained to Google about Chrome, they filed 33 bugs and fixed many of them. The point here is to be an agent of change, not an agent of patches :)