Re: More Core Committers?
Quick thoughts from my iPad…
For there to be more core committers, there needs for there to be more outstanding core patchers. There are a handful of great ones already, and they are noticed and recognized for their contributions. The leads are Andy and myself, and ultimately the future of the core project is decided by us. Very similar to WordPress, we keep an eye on developer plugins to look for anything that would make a good core feature.
Feature requests are great when there are people to do create them, but the best place to talk about core development is on the trac. The forums are more for support and discussion than they are for code talk, but part of that is also because currently the forums don’t play nicely with code blocks.
I don’t think we’re closing threads unless the discussion goes severely off topic or is no longer productive. If we are, I would agree that we shouldn’t be locking topics prematurely. Regarding the codex, anyone has the ability to modify it, so if anything is out of date anyone is free to fix it.
I also agree that things will be easier for us and make more sense when buddypress.org is a website worthy of being in its own showcase. Right now it’s a basic install with lots of custom bits to help integrate wp.org plugins.
It hurts to just add committers for the sake of having committers. Commit rights are earned through writing great core patches and showing a comprehension for the direction of the core project. There are plenty of great plugin devs that have written thousands of lines of their own code, but haven’t directly contributed to core.
Ultimately it would be great if we had one developer per core component to focus on it’s future, but so far no one has showed initiative to want to make improvements to anything. Right now we’re in a transition period where the branch and trunk need to be merged before I think a few more people are comfortable writing giant patches, but that time will come.
Paul hit almost every nail on the head in his reply above. It’s great that you see the need, now fill it. 
