Design Decisions

I've been looking at bugs in the Ant bug list. A lot of them are technically complex, and I don't want to mess with things I don't fully understand. I tried looking for bugs with "trivial" and "minimal" severities, in the hope that they might be easier for me to solve.
However, the biggest issue is that almost all the bugs have a discussion thread going on, with people arguing about the design decisions and the wisdom / feasibility of enhancements / bug-fixes. That makes it really hard to judge whether or not should I even try to fix something.
But as a peripheral developer, I suppose that it is not mine to decide the design: that is up to the core. I should probably submit a patch, and then leave it up to them if they want to incorporate it or not.
The search continues.

The original post can be found here: https://anterence.blogspot.com/2010/05/ive-been-looking-at-bugs-in-ant-bug.html