> how's your luck at debugging let alone getting a patch accepted in MS-SQL, for instance?
Duh, none or nearly none, of course.
I'm not saying that proprietary binary blobs are better. There are exceptions, but generally they're significantly worse in this regard.
I'm only saying that just because software is FLOSS doesn't mean one can successfully hack on it and adapt it to their needs, or easily migrate to other FLOSS solutions. Sometimes, they'll be stuck for a while - I think that's also can be considered as a lock-in.
> Nobody made their code complex because they felt like it.
Maybe. But there's a term "over-engineering" too. It's not that someone decides to make things unnecessarily complex, but sometimes they really do.
> If you overcame that and made a patch, but it's not accepted by the upstream
As for how well the FLOSS projects are managed, how's your luck at debugging let alone getting a patch accepted in MS-SQL, for instance?
> I saw tons of forks on GitHub that were slowly rotting away
I saw people with food, who weren't eating it because they were full, and I decided that food was stupid. Right?
> How long would you be able to maintain your own fork of a large software project, keeping up with the upstream?
Far longer than a binary patch... You know, to block a certain cipher suite or something in a closed-source product.