6 months is not a long time for an open source project me thinks. For example if your country has a Mandatory Military Service law, then you'll not be doing anything for at least 6 months (in Turkey this is upto 15 months if you did not graduate from collage). So, yes you can not know what the module author is dealing with. He can be ill, can have finance probs, $work can take all his/her time, he/she may even be dead (eg: Nick Ing-Simmons)

I think it's better to ask for co-maintainership if you think that the bugs are really critical and you can even take full control over a specific module if the author is abandoned it (I abondoned a module and gave the maintainer rights to someone else for example). Another option is asking a co-maintainer permission from PAUSE admins (you are not Andreas König right? :) if the bug is causing critical failures. I think this was done for Template Toolkit some time back...

If none suits you, you can always fork it and re-create Abc.pm as AbcX.pm and apply the fixes / release to CPAN if the license of the original module permits this.