When you build on a chain, you are inheriting every design decision and every latent bug in its core modules. The team that wrote those modules knows the keeper internals, the migration paths, the parameter footguns, and the consensus-critical edges — because they argued about them in the original PRs. That knowledge does not come from reading a README. It comes from having shipped the code and lived with the consequences.
When a chain upgrade breaks something, or a module behaves in a way the docs don't explain, the team that authored that module isn't filing a support ticket with someone else. They are reading code they wrote. This is the practical case for working with upstream contributors rather than integrators.