Well, you can try to help, but there is no guarantee that your help is welcome. You will have to do the work, then convince the maintainer to accept it. If the maintainer is unresponsive, you may work for nothing. This seems the case here: we don't know why the maintainer is unresponsive. And people can't casually upload a new version due to strong ownership culture.
Would the stable release managers not accept a non-maintainer upload? I agree the strong ownership culture is a serious problem, but it mostly affects unstable, right?
