So, I had a look at articles for creation today, and there was nearly 1,000 pending article submissions. Articles for creation has changed a lot since 2008 - it was of a similar structure to XFD - all submissions for a particular day were on one page, and people could come along and approve or reject based in certain criteria.
I think that system worked well. True, we have a lot more article creations, but I think it gave more visibility than the current system where everything is subpaged.
Some may think that the bar at AFC is set too high but this high bar discourages new users, especially when their submissions stay unreviewed for weeks at a time. And since editor retention is something we are trying to focus on, it seems a worthy project since many new users have their first experiences in AFC. The lack of volunteers in wikiprojects like AFC is not a new thing, so it's not that volunteers have reduced. I think we need to consider if AFC is something we still want to have, and if so, how can we improve it?
Steve Zhang