I agree that there's enough active development that groff should have a more frequent release cycle than it has of late (though I understand the lack of manpower to spearhead this).
I think any open bugs that include a patch should have that patch applied or rejected (either as WONTFIX or with reasons given why the patch needs improvement). Several are hanging there in limbo, not applied but with no feedback on whether they have deficiencies or simply haven't been looked at yet. (In particular, #57638 documents a regression introduced in v1.22.4 and includes a patch to unregress it.) It seems that bug reports with patches ought to be the lowest-hanging fruit on the savannah tree.