I really like Drupal. It is fun to work with, technically stimulating, and the rewrite that was Drupal 8 allowed me to bring my PHP skills screaming and kicking into the modern era. This was my greatest fear and the the thing I was most looking forward to. I'd gotten to the point where I didn't really consider myself a PHP dev any more. I was a Drupal dev. Drupal 8 made me a PHP dev once again. PHP still has it's issues, but it is so much more than it was back in the early days.
I've been working with Drupal for 15-16 years now. As a thing I did as a job it was becoming just a little too much. So I stopped.
About 5 months ago I switched teams at Catalyst IT. I am now on the Mahara team and I'm getting to work on an Open Source project and make meaningful contributions to that project. I feel very fortunate that Catalyst IT maintains a team to work on this at a product, rather than using it as one. Don't get me wrong, Catalyst does use this as a product and we help many clients get it set up, configured and, if needed, do custom work on it.
When I arrived on the team they were in the midst of a large custom project for the Pharmacy Council of New Zealand and watching the team work on that gave me a lot of confidence in the move to this team. Very well organised. PCNZ is also a supporter of Open Source Software and understands the nature of it. Much of the work done on that project was rolled into Mahara.
In Drupal-land I was only able to work with the project and, when bugs got in the way of client work, I was able to contribute back. But usually only on the contrib module that had the issue. Very rarely did I get to contribute to Drupal Core.
Last night was the 84th Mahara Dev meeting. Myself and Fergus, another co-worker here at Catalyst, were up for acceptance as Approved Developers. This is the Drupal equivalent of being a Core Committer. We were both accepted.
So... I'm now Core contributor to the Mahara Project. :)