I just realized that, even though I use vim every day and work on open-source software for a living, I have no idea what vim's open source model looks like. It's been such an out-of-the-way tool for me that I treat it like a pencil. It's just there, waiting for me to use it.
Pretty much my experience too. Every few months my distro collects up a bag of patches, then I receive a new build. Once every couple of years I get to go through a version${new}.txt help file, often receiving a few new goodies.
My only real interaction was a few years ago when I opened a doc typo PR, and received a quick response from Bram. Then it faded away again.
Nuts.