I agree that there are issues here. I have personally been disinclined to propose patches becuase the response and feedback of the patches and proposals has been limited and frankly a little discouraging. However I am mature enought to realize this situation may be because of legitimate concerns about the quality of the patches, the need of the patches and the skills and responsibility of the developers. (In this case me.)

I think there are issues with opening up code access, and responsibilty. Serious hacks could cause us problems with our kind hosts. Responsibility comes with expanded commit rights to the DB. A poorly judged patch could bring the site to its knees, and require serious time commitments to clean up and resolve. Those that would have to do the dirty work would not be impressed or happy about it.

OTOH A process of review and consensus amongst the developers and an expanded gods and pmdev group would probably be a good middle ground. However assessing responsibility and and skills of those involved is difficult and I can see why vroom and tye are shy of the subject. Theres a lot of possible solutions to opening up PM to more development, but all of them require risk and trust and work and responsibility and time.