I'm not sure I follow your conclusion. It sounds like the problem with LIMS is too much talk and not enough action, while the problem with Agora is lousy developers. Neither of these things will be improved by more discussion.

Discussion is always the first thing to try, but if that fails and you end up in a deadlock, the next step is to put your code where your mouth is, and write it yourself. If you offer a patch and the maintainer won't accept it, you can always fork the project or offer your patch separately. Eventually, either social pressure will cause the forks to merge or one of them will just die off.

I do have a lot of sympathy for project maintainers who come across as difficult because they take a "patches welcome" attitude towards feature requests. There are always a lot more people asking for things and using a project than there are contributing. That's why I try not to whine about anything too much unless I'm willing to write code for it. After all, as a user I am getting something for nothing until I actually write code.

You also have to consider that open source projects often succeed due to the strength of one or two core contriutors with a vision. It's precisely this lack of formal RFC methodologies that allows tremendous progress to be made on a project. You have an idea, you code it. It sounds to me like LIMS is all RFC and no project, and that's the root of the problem.

Incidentally, I just glanced at the AgoraCart code, and I think that if I ever did something based on this I would be eager to distance myself from the name of this thing. This is horrible code: Perl 4 style, cgi-lib.pl, hardly any CPAN modules, no package declarations at all in the Agora code, and NO STRICT!