I think part of my problem was the barrier to contribution was really low

Interesting. I was just the other day wondering if a github mirror of the OpenBSD ports tree existed. In my searching, I found this thread[1] in which Ted Unangst sort of alluded to the same idea:

github is all about social coding and they have a point. But many of the things they enable are considered antisocial in the OpenBSD development process.

[1] http://openbsd-archive.7691.n7.nabble.com/OpenBSD-on-GitHub-...