Well, we, developers, certainly aren't the most people-friendly bunch in the world.
I have learned so far that many of us have quite profound issues with our assertiveness, maturity, sense of ownership and/or responsibility for things we own. Many of those issues are masked with bloated ego or bad attitude.
I never expect a decent support from an open source project. This makes it a nice surprise if there is one, but in general I am aware what cost is associated with a proper product support. If someone runs the project out of hours, spending time dealing with people asking for something may be seen as a loss of time for coding. An inexperienced developer may not understand what gives his software value so it is a trap very easy to fall into.
Overall, people you dealt with behaved badly. They should have given some feedback within decent timing (a week, let's say), they should have taken ownership for their projects' reliability (if one uses an unreliable dependency and does not defend against this, one is unreliable) and treated others as equals instead of what they did. These people seem like wrong people in the wrong place.
I'm too spoiled, I try to give a customer support as good as possible and get disappointed if I don't get the same in return =D
It's very good that you have the maturity in your approach, but it's not justified to expect the same in return elsewhere. If you pay - it's different. If it's open source - well, people are people, with all their shortcomings. They may need some time to get there. It may be longer than their lifetime.
Like I noted in my post, I'm not mad if people don't offer a communication channel for support for open source project, as its an open source project and not everyone has the time. But, if it is available, and the person is there, I ask to be treated correctly, and I'd be happy already with a "Currently I don't have the time, but I'll definitely put it on my list".
I know, you are right :)
This reminds me of a one comedy settled in the seventies in a Polish village: one of the characters had a bathroom in the house because one of the neighbours had it and she didn't want to be worse, but it was neither used nor maintained, and everyone used the loo outside ;)
Maybe it's one of those "we have to, we can't be worse than others"case.