what would be the practicalities of Thomas just hacking the code
to his own satisfaction? That kind of solution never seems to be
suggested but it would seem to be a possibility.
It's always implicit that anyone can submit a patch, though usually that should happen on zsh-workers rather than -users. (Everyone on -workers gets to see -users by default, so the distinction is mostly so the consumers don't have to see the sausage being made, so to speak.) But at least for me the presumption on -users is that an answer that works now is preferable to one that has to wait for the next version or use a local build.