I think I've seen patches stay in the "New" state in the following cases: * He's convinced you do not have the ability to write a patch he would accept. (There's a common pattern where people will take feedback and attempt to revise their patch to account for it, but not really understand the feedback or how to apply it. The only way to get an acceptable patch in this situation would be to do the work for the submitter.) * He's convinced you're taking a completely wrong approach. (And generally someone has explained this in reply to a previous revision of that patch.) * He thinks there's a good chance you'll revise the patch without his intervention, and is waiting to see if that happens. * The patch is difficult to review, and he's putting it off. * He's travelling and does not have access to a machine that can successfully run the Wine test suite, and he thinks the patch might break the tests.
But I'm guessing based on imperfect memory, so I could be wrong.