Who's to say kwaping isn't one of the "motivated / smart" people you mention, and this is his/her effort to get together a small group of people to do just that. Maybe s/he doesn't have the right friends for the job, but is excellent at choosing good people and organising them?

I agree that less is more (that phrase could have been invented for talking about the size of programming teams) but there's nothing in the OP that mentions "getting as many people as possible to participate".