Usually when I discover bugs in things part of Emacs itself I just work
around them, since starting to contribute to the project would require
signing papers etc., which would be a huge hurdle compared to what I'm
fixing (none of my Magit contributions are major, just small fixes here
& there).
That's interesting, because everything I've contributed so far to emacs (2 small code patches and 1 documentation patch, *only*) is trivial and I've signed the papers right away to not be bothered with that anymore.
For one paper signed, you can contribute your fixes that will be used by *all* the emacs community. So a few minutes of your time allow your code to help *everybody* in the emacs community however trivial you think your contribution is.
And conversely, you would not find emacs as useful as it is now if hundreds of people had not taken a few minutes of their time to sign the papers.
Jean-Christophe