That's easy to say, but sometimes I need to fix bugs in downstream packages, and I am not willing to wait for 6 months (or forever in some cases) for a fix to be released.
Then Linux distro a year out my patched censored version and link to the buggy upstream, and I have to keep telling bug reporters to not use the distro version.
A useful thing to do when forking software is to give it a new name, to make it clear that it's a separate thing. It sounds like you copied some specific version of software you depend on, then forked it, but left the name the same -- which caused confusion by package builders at the distribution since it's a bit of work to determine if you forked the dependency or are just including it for non-distribution user's convenience.
Then Linux distro a year out my patched censored version and link to the buggy upstream, and I have to keep telling bug reporters to not use the distro version.