Yeah, I think they already go quite out of their way by mentioning scripts & co in the release notes, which is nice.

But I don't agree that Jolla shouldn't bother doing this - I can't help myself but think about patches mostly as a temporary solution for the following two problems:

1. closed source GUI components
   I think that many patches could be "upstreamed" and maintained as (optional ?) features of the GUI by the community if the respective components were open source & with an upstream where to send patches/pull requests.
2. insufficient pluggability in the GUI
   Stuff too radical/too big to integrate directly with the GUI components themselves could make use of suitable hooks, plugin interfaces, DBUS API to interact with the system when installed by the user (eq. they would not be part of the "default firmware" and would be installed by the user.
   
   There are already some GUI extensions interfaces (sharing interface, telepathy plugins, etc.), but they are IMHO currently quite lacking & are often undocumented when they do exist.

So until these two issues are solved, Jolla should certainly care about patches & the surrounding community as its basically just a (temporary ?) workaround for features lacking in the platform (Sailfish OS) they are trying to develop.