What?

How representative are maintainers? That sounds like a very interesting question but quite different from "people shout at and don't understand each other". You can have extremely polite maintainers that are not representative at all.

Like any other volunteer work, being a maintainer has an element of "trade": trading the work against dictating how it's done to some extent. This is summarized in the "BDFL" acronym. Again, all such "dictatorship" can be done very quietly and politely.

Of course this works only up to a point: no one wants a totally disconnected volunteer. But then:
1. How do you measure the disconnection?
2. Do you even have someone else to take over?

To measure 1. you could organize... a shouting match? Could not resist sorry :-)