All I'm saying is that a full-on fork is not the right thing to do when all you're trying to do is have your own frontend, or modify a small number of packages.

It's not really a binary concept either. It's a scale from "immediate & transparent overlay" (not keeping anything from OpenWrt vendored and just piling on top) all the way to "hard fork" (one-time hard break from source) with lots of steps inbetween.

Also, wtf is "pull request begging"? If you can't get pull requests merged, that normally means the target project doesn't have enough maintainers. In turn, that means you should be going around reviewing pull requests on your own initiative. You don't need anyone's permission to make comments on other people's pull requests (at least not in general.) Just do it. I mean, yeah, some projects have very high or maybe even obnoxious requirements, but in my experience that's very rare and happens primarily with "enterprise" / "corporate" things. Unless proven otherwise, I'll assume most FOSS projects are at least trying to make things work collectively. OpenWrt certainly does.