Pull requests are preferred since thats the project workflow, a patch would need to be made into a PR which is more effort and would make it less likely to get merged in a project limited by volunteer time available.
I understand. On the other hand I'd prefer sending a patch as I'm not yet familiar (at all, that is) with pull requests — it also sounds like a lot of work pulling the complete repo (twice, if I got it right, one public and one on my machine) for (what I assume) one added line of code, especially for a one-shot exercise. And I have no public repository in fact. I don't even plan to. So I'll see what I can do and post again here whatever happens :) .