GTK 4.0

Why users of a library are often not also contributors of that said library? Because developers are busy enough with their own projects. Otherwise everybody would end up being kernel developers or physicians and mathematicians.

As a personal story, after two-three years of developing a GTK LaTeX editor (during my spare time), I started to contribute to the GtkSourceView library. And in a short period of time my focus had completely switched to GtkSourceView, not the LaTeX editor anymore (because lack of time of course).

As a single individual, you cannot at the same time develop a whole application with a lot of features, *and* develop all the libraries that you use. Except if you have a lot of funding or a thriving community of contributors.

Again, to continue my personal story, nowadays I would love to write a new text widget, or to significantly improve GtkTextView. But I know that if I do that, it would become my main project for the foreseeable future, and I don't really have the funding for that.