@sprite_tm I think the main reason for suggesting Github is that it provides an area to discuss bugs / features with you and others in the community before sending a patch (as a contributor there's always a bit of uncertainty that what you're working on is a) going to be merged and b) up to scratch). But the process for adding support for large post requests seemed to work pretty well last time, so I'm happy to do that again, where we work as though my fork was the master and then you pull the changes in when you're happy with them. One issue is that my Github fork becomes the area for collaboration rather than your own, but I don't mind if you don't. Sharing merge privileges isn't something I was suggesting, just being able to have more eyes on incoming code. You'd still be the BDFL
I share a bit of your uneasiness about having a two stage firmware upgrade process, because it would be nice to be able to upgrade the firmware without then having to reflash the espfs image. However, if you want to do it all at once then we'd need to adjust some memory boundaries to make room I think (you'd also have to have smaller espfs images). My explorations into adjusting the memory layout hit a bit of a brick wall because of my lack of knowledge of linker scripts, etc but I daresay you'd get further.
+1 for esp-httpd as a library, and them maybe a separate demo project so people can understand how to integrate it