Right, I thought one of the big benefits about pull requests was that it let other devs easily view the diffs before merging a change in, not to mention making it easier for people to discuss the changes. I guess if you don't want to do that then it's easier to just pass around patches and merge.
Viewing changes in a pull request is no easier than viewing the changes in a patchset (or rather, if it is you're using the wrong tools). For an established team, a PR-based workflow and a mailing list based workflow (where you mail patchsets to the mailing list and discuss them there) are not very different, but PRs are a lot friendlier to outside contributors.
