My bug report #247299 was answered quickly and I wrote the demanded patch. Since I posted the patch, there is deadly silence. Sorry for offering the contribution.
I have committed your patch. It is always nice to see patches that make heavy dependencies optional, thanks for that. It is always better to continue bumping the original PR rather than create a new one. Original PR will more likely have relevant people in CC, and the new PR needs to be triaged. As for timeouts, it happens because most of us are volunteers and doing all these things in spare time.