I sometimes receive patches where the contributor just tried to shoehorn the feature they wanted in the codebase; they didn't understand the project architecture, just found a way to get it working.
And I may receive a bug report where the user bisected the history to find which commit introduced the bug, and provide me with all inputs to confirm the issue and reproduce it myself.
Even if the latter contribution doesn't fix the bug, it will end up being merged: they found an issue, dug to find it; but they don't how to fix it while keeping in line with the library's internals.
In other words: the more a contributor tries to understand your goals and design as a project maintainer, and respects them, the more valuable their contribution — be it bug reports, documentation improvements, blog posts, or patches.
It seems we agree eg, a paid dev's feature request is not comparable to the paid dev contributing the feature itself via discussion with the maintainer.
Nor is it comparable to the maintainer stopping what they are doing to sit there and provide the feature as if their time was worth less than that of the paid dev who wants to consume it.
Regardless of whether the contributor is paid, I think that feature requests and bug reports can be compared to feature implementations.
If the feature request includes, for example, technical architecture and product design analysis, and illustrates that it has considered various other options, it could be highly valuable.
A bug report could have involved significant debugging to identify approximate causes, affected versions, and potentially-related commits that introduced/regressed the bug.
All of the above applies to documentation and support commentary too. There is a spectrum with any contribution from 'minimal' to 'thorough', and there's not necessarily a causal link between high-value contributions and paid work.
A quick fix is a great way to describe a bug for the person that understands the system.
On many projects the mantainers ask way to much of the submitter in following some guidelines. I feel they think they should not "steal" the submit from the submitter or something becouse fixing stuff for them would equal the work of commenting it.
I sometimes receive patches where the contributor just tried to shoehorn the feature they wanted in the codebase; they didn't understand the project architecture, just found a way to get it working.
And I may receive a bug report where the user bisected the history to find which commit introduced the bug, and provide me with all inputs to confirm the issue and reproduce it myself.
Even if the latter contribution doesn't fix the bug, it will end up being merged: they found an issue, dug to find it; but they don't how to fix it while keeping in line with the library's internals.
In other words: the more a contributor tries to understand your goals and design as a project maintainer, and respects them, the more valuable their contribution — be it bug reports, documentation improvements, blog posts, or patches.