Hi!
It was a big contrast to my interactions with the PHP community, which were so often negative. For example, Jani's toxic behaviour on the bug tracker, closing bugs as "bogus" despite being serious and reproducible, usually because he didn't understand them technically. Even with other maintainers, I had to fight several times to keep serious bugs open. I had no illusions that they would ever be fixed, I just wanted them to be open for my reference and for the benefit of anyone hitting the same issue. I filed bugs as "documentation issues", requesting that undesired behaviour be documented in the manual, since they were more likely to stay open that way.
By your mention of Jani, I derive it was a long time ago :) Quite a lot changed since then, even though the internals list is still not the most friendly place on the nets. But the processes got better, I think, and the level of maturity of both discussion and participants increased.
Also, thank you for the kind words, and I'll be glad to help with what I can if we need something done in PHP core.