Believe me, I'm sympathetic. I work on a project with a million or so users, and a very small team supporting it. I'll try to find ways to follow up more directly on stuff like this. As I said, IRC (and the specific IRC channels of the modules I use, like drupal-commerce) has been occasionally helpful, and can occasionally nudge someone into looking at my tickets/patches. I've got a handful of new patches that I'd like to submit, will try to follow up more directly with the relevant devs, rather than just dropping them in the issue tracker and forgetting about them.
And this is where being a contributor pays off: if $random_guy comes in and says hey look at this patch, people might or might not and it might get in or might not. It's an entirely different thing when someone we know does the same, for so many reasons. One, there's the whole karma thing. Second, if I know this is not your first rodeo then I will be much more willing to invest my time in it (hint: time is the scarce resource hence the currency in open source world) because I'll know you already have coding standards, obvious API usage etc down pat.
You need to give us a chance to be friendly. If you a drop a patch in a queue which has 10K other patches and then, as you said, move on then the chances of this patch being picked up is quite low.
