Jumping in to clarify a couple of problems with that assertion:
- It’s a fact of life that any serious open source project will have a contributor’s agreement that needs to be signed before a contribution can be accepted. It’s just how copyright (and left
) works. I urge you to take a look at the agreement. It’s pretty reasonable and understandable, as far as these things go. - While many community contributions indeed take a significant amount of time to get merged, this is largely not because of the contributor’s agreement. Most often, the delay is simply due to the maintainers not having enough time to get to them all. The good news is that edX is actively looking to remedy this via the Core Commiters Program - i.e., delegating merge rights to community members that stand up to certain very reasonable criteria.
Which is all to say: worry not, there’s every chance that this fix will get into Lilac, the next Open edX release. 
(And since it looks like you’re a heavy library user, you might want to keep tabs on the new Library Authoring experience, which is currently under development.)