I seems to me that GitHub's "social coding" is slowly turning things inside-out and upside-down.
At the beginning, you have a problem and you try to solve it yourself. If you succeed in doing so, great! Job done. The project is already successful at this point.
Next, you can take the extra step of open-sourcing it, because it might be useful for others too, and you might maybe benefit from the improvements, bug fixes or bug reports of others.
But if you start spending more time on dealing with emails, PRs etc. and it's no fun, just say no. Ignore people calling you "unprofessional" and whatnot. You owe them nothing.
There's another step at the beginning: after you have a problem, you search for similar projects that might have already solved your problem.
And in fact this step seems to generate most of the bug reports - you get "please implement feature X" and "does this have feature Y?" and so on, from people who have used your software for all of 5 minutes (or not at all).
It's only after a lot of time is wasted that a new project is started. Alternatively, it could be that the people who try to use/reuse software and the people who write new software are completely separate, so that no amount of bug tracker work will lead to new source contributions.
At the beginning, you have a problem and you try to solve it yourself. If you succeed in doing so, great! Job done. The project is already successful at this point.
Next, you can take the extra step of open-sourcing it, because it might be useful for others too, and you might maybe benefit from the improvements, bug fixes or bug reports of others.
But if you start spending more time on dealing with emails, PRs etc. and it's no fun, just say no. Ignore people calling you "unprofessional" and whatnot. You owe them nothing.