It currently takes a lot of time to try and find patches that can benefit from their help to move forward. One easy to implement idea on how to improve that is to include a freeform status field for a patch, possibly this should be called "blocked on"/"What's needed?". Authors/reviewers could fill this in with a short summary of the situation and what is currently needed according to them to move this patch forward, either from reviewers/committers/authors.