I went through a similar experience with the NM process some ten years ago except I ended up giving up on the whole thing. After being told I absolutely had to answer a load of questions within a week for a week that happened to be very inconvenient, my answers then got completely ignored. I carried on maintaining the one package until a few years ago when I gave up because nobody would sponsor an upload until the freeze at which point I was being told I had to backport bug fixes to the old release. I actually ended up jumping to FreeBSD before the whole systemd mess hit and I've found it to have a friendlier community.