The PR-based development process is almost universal amongst open source projects. That’s really crucial: we’re not in the business of inventing new ways for open source projects to run. A small community like ours can only exist by riding on the shoulders of all the other open source projects, and doing things in broadly the same way. The sharing philosophy that we see within our own community also exists at a higher level, with communities of communities sharing tools and processes.
So, I think it’s important to cast this not as a problem that is unique to our community, but one that is shared with other projects. That’s important because we have little choice but to build our own infrastructure for things that are unique to our project. But it’s not economic for us to build infrastructure for problems that are universal to all (or most) projects.
That means that to solve this I think we need to look outside of our own project, and explore what solutions other projects use.
I know that many projects, for instance, make it super-easy to spin up an instance of the project on services like https://sandbox.io/. If things are set up correctly, forking the code and getting it up in an editor is a one click operation. It is possible for users to create a PR with their changes, but it is also possible for somebody else to do that for them.