Gregory's Server@Sobex @lina IMO regardless of subsystem you'll have to endure the structural issues plaguing RFL, but a subsystem full of people willing and motivated to help should alleviate those significantly
And there's also the problem that if your interest is in a specific area of kernel dev (drm, net, whatever), you've only got so much wiggle room to avoid maintainers unwilling to help more.
Someone i talked about this with mentioned forking as well, but that comes with the human cost of maintaining the upstream source (mainline), people having to decide whether to leave the main project, stay, or invest twice as much energy, and the risk that nobody will really use your fork (Asahi Linux being the huge exception for that point lmao)
@SharpLimefox @Sobex Hard forks aren't sustainable. Asahi Linux tracks upstream and with that comes a maintenance cost proportional to how much it diverges. The plan was always to upstream almost everything... the project doesn't have a long term future if we get stuck maintaining large amounts out of tree forever (a few patches is OK and we already have a couple "upstream is never going to take this and that's fine, we can live with that" cases... but it can't grow without bound)