I always have Gramps installed on my laptop, and occasionally I import my ged-file, either just to see how Gramps has evolved, or because of some specific task that it does better than webtrees – mostly exports, coming to think of it.
Locations is a gedcom-inherent problem. It is partly solved in webtrees through a plugin which allows one to have a geolocation with several different names, countries, etc. Works quite well, I think.
I even thought of doing some pull requests in their git but I’m not sure since … well I’ll just be honest - I’m scared of joining OpenSource projects, they always sound so hostile. But maybe it’s time to give it a try
Could be the case (the attitude/response I hate the most is when one points out a serious flaw or shortcoming, and some dev responds: "why don't you do this instead?"), but on average I think most of them are nice. Go ahead and try!