I think we're looking at it two different ways. You've decided to embed yourself in the minutiae of FOSS whereas it is important for it to be embedded everywhere and thus that propagates FOSS and its meritocracy however whenever a corporation, say LinkSys does that, they do so without adding any fixes, concerns or other finds into the mainstream and create a fork that benefits only themselves. Making money out in the open is quite hard - meaning that it's great to have an army of developers solve your problems yet many bigger corporations rarely give back.
But for how long? Many great projects with a lot of hope that started off promising simply die to lack of updates. I'll rather respect somebody that continues to support their endeavors or at least try to remain visible and drum up energy. Folks like Shuttleworth, Torvalds and even to a lesser extent Somasegar, all rallied behind projects that required many others to support their endeavors but they did so with a passion that made adding to the project feel like you were adding to the better not to the worse parts of the FOSS meritocracy.
Allow me to simplify my statements and be brutally blunt: I meant these so-called experts that bury themselves into the FOSS environment and rarely add much more than snide remarks, contrarian beliefs and impose their point of view unto every single ****ing discussion and rarely add anything of worth, ever.
That is the second part of why I disagree with the current iteration of FOSS meritocracy. It actually works, but how do you enforce corporation to give back? They take and take. And if they take, they should pay (respect or money).