In a CLA-restricted project, there's only one entitity that can contribute copyleft code. Everyone else must donate the code to them, and they forbid themselves from using other people's copyleft code, because they can't relicense it.
It seems like what's bothering him is:
> give a single entity, the project steward, a special license distinct from the one that everyone else gets, so that they may use your contribution in any way they please
But that's not a justification.
The project steward is contributing more than 90% of the code, maintain the infrastructure and servers, do the promotion, ...
So yeah, they may give some condition to accept your contribution, but I think that's fair. They don't force you to contribute. And depending of the motivation for your contribution, you get what you want, eg, the feeling of contributing to an open source project presumably used by many people, or having that entity to maintain your patch for free.
I mean, you can fork if you like, but the likelihood that your fork is getting used is not that big, and mean more work from your side to maintain the change.
There's a famous talk about this, which resulted in many us referring to Oracle and its billionaire CEO as the "lawn mower."
