HAving arguments on behalf of other people is an unfortunately common conversational trap, especially in asynchronous mediums like mailing lists and forums.
As someone who has been following emacs development and recruiting people to help with it for multiple decades, let me say this: there is a common (notorious) belief that contributing is difficult/complex/requiring of confounding steps. The reality has improved a great deal over the pat ~5-6 years (due to heroic efforts of people like Eli, Lars, Stephan, Philip, John, Chong, Stefan -- among others). At the same time, the baseline effort required to participate in "open" development (whatever the term) has dropped considerably, trending strongly towards the sort of "drive by contrib" possibility that is common in many projects.
The end result is, I would have to agree, that it is still, at least somewhat "notoriously hard to contribute to emacs". It's moving in a good direction, but the effort surely has headroom left to fill.
There are frequent discussions on emacs-devel about new ways to address this issue. I would caution people in this threat against getting caught in yet another such thread, as they tend to consume a lot of oxygen, but that's obviously up to each individual.
I hope that helps,
~Chad