So, why am I not trying to learn Gerrit or try to submit patches? Because it's not worth my time. The interface is so far outside of what I'm used to, and it's just so touchy. By comparison, GitHub has a solid, no frills, Mac app that handles all of the important stuff. And, even when I committed to GitHub by command line, there was no way I could "Merge branch 'master' of ssh://gerrit.wikimedia.org:29418/mediawiki/core" by miss-typing a re-base https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/37684/.
Thank you for sharing this view. This was my fear and it is useful to get this view.
To me I would be happy having more contributions regardless of quality. A contribution in itself is wonderful as it shows an interest in the work that is being done and a will to help with that work. We should be striving to mentor any developer who contributes poor quality code not see this as a negative thing. To me this is what is so beautiful about open source development - we get the opportunity to create awesome things and create awesome developers.