I don't understand. What do you mean by "learning curve to develop" an existing Python library?
To contribute to an existing repository, you can ]dev the package to download the git repository, @edit a function to open the source in an editor, and push the changes to a PR in about 10 minutes. This makes it much easier for package users to turn into package developers.
I've contributed to a bunch of Julia libraries that if I still used python, I wouldn't have contributed to the equivalent python library because contributing to Julia packages is at least an order of magnitude easier.