Mentioning since you say you don’t like ugly, I use Pano (on Gnome 49/Fedora 43) and have no issues with Kate (current version from Flathub) and it looks pretty (imo) as it does little thumbnails for everything. Although I’ve been meaning to try Copyous as it has that + at pointer paste.

Not everything sent in PR is an improvement from everyone pov though. It might be an improvement for the contributor of a new feature they might be the only one to ever use, while it adds maintenance burden for you, more dependencies, risks of bugs etc for the community, which you have to balance somehow. Plus you might have a view on how to do things properly on your project, which needs to be communicated to contributors, which is additional work you might not have time for, especially if this is just some small side project.