I don’t have any stake in the matter, except as a user of the tools, but I do want to speak in defense of the iD team. I observe their day-to-day interactions on the OSM-US Slack, and it has been my impression that they are extremely responsive to bug fixes, clearly doing a lot of work on personal time, and helpful to users who have questions or concerns about presets, documentation, and other aspects of the project. As an outside user, it strikes me as a very well run OS project.

Where things have gotten tense recently, it seems to be around issues and other discussion that is less about the code and the tool, and more about broader arguments around data privacy (which I care about as well), finer points of licensing or the role of different members or teams in the community. It can come off as quite personal, and puts a bit of an unfair onus on a few developers to defend the strategy of a whole organization. Being the maintainer of a core application like this puts a giant target on their backs, and I would hope you can see how that is a stressful position to be in.

I’d like to think that some well thought out patches would be accepted by the id folks, if they are focused on the tool itself, rather than any larger grievances with OSM, OSMF, OSMUS, Mapbox, etc. Assume good faith, and remember that in all cases here we are dealing with individual people, not faceless organizations.