Love the GitHub quote & the concept of not taking a request at face-value, but instead thinking about how to solve the request’s underlying problem in the smartest possible way. Excellent insight for anyone building a community.
Larry Niven once wrote (about one of his collaborations with Jerry Pournelle) that they received a list of corrections to their manuscript from the publisher, had a meeting with him (probably by phone) and systematically argued him out of every one of those changes. Then, after the meeting, they sat down together, went through the list, and addressed every point on it, making some change (maybe half the time the suggested one) every time.
The lesson I learned from that anecdote (which might just be familiar to anyone who has read through this blog post and the comments on it) is that feedback is great at identifying problems; lousy at identifying solutions.