Hi @bethac07!!! 
Well, as you might have gathered from my involvement in that discussion, imho you should be contributing to imageio, not skimage. To the extent that skimage improves here it’ll probably be as a thin wrapper around imageio.
At any rate, I think the iio folks will be grateful to get some more eyeballs on their code… Currently it’s pretty much just @FirefoxMetzger and a bit of Almar Klein keeping that going… 