Writing in my volunteer capacity:
Honestly, the situation is more dire than you think. For example, until a couple months ago, we didn't have backups for the media files. There was a live copy in the secondary datacenter but for example if due to a software issue, we lost some files, they were gone. I would like to thank Jaime Crespo for pushing for it and implementing the backups.
But I beat my drum again, it's not something you can fix overnight. I'm sure people are monitoring this mailing list and are aware of the problem.
[My goal in this post is to ficus effort and reduce frustration.]
Yes, people reading here are aware, and absolutely none of them expects this (i.e. multimedia technical debt and missing features) to be fixed overnight.
What's lacking, as you pointed out, is ownership of the problem. To own the problem, one must have *both* technical understanding of the issues *and* a mandate to devote resources to addressing them.
It is this *combination* that we don't have at the moment. Lots of technical people are aware, and some of them quite willing to work toward addressing the issues, but they are not empowered to set priorities and commit resources for an effort of that scale, and the problems, for the most part, don't easily lend themselves to volunteer development.
It seems to me there are *very few* people who could change status quo, not much more than a handful: the Foundation's executive leadership (in its annual planning work, coming up this first quarter of 2022), and the Board of Trustees.
Therefore, the greatest contribution the rest of us could make toward seeing this work get resourced is to help make the case to the executives (including the new CEO, just entering the role) with clear and compelling illustrations of the *mission impact* of such investment. In parallel, interested engineers and middle managers could help by offering rough effort estimates for some components, a roadmap, an overview of alternatives considered and a rationale for a recommended approach, etc.
But this would all be preparatory and supporting work toward *a resourcing decision* being made. So long as such a decision isn't made, no significant work on this can happen.
Finally, while it is easy to agree that *this* is necessary and useful on its own, to actual resource it in the coming annual plan it would be necessary to argue that it is *more* useful and necessary than some *other* work, itself also necessary and useful.
Another thing that may help is being explicit about just how important this is, even literally saying things like "this would have far more impact on our X goal than initiative A, B, or C", naming actual resourced or potentially resourced things. It is sometimes difficult for managers who aren't practicing Wikimedia volunteers to assess just how necessary different necessary things are, from different community perspectives.
And of course, one such opinion, or a handful, would not be a solid base for resourcing decisions, so perhaps a large-scale ranking survey of some sort would be helpful, as SJ implicitly suggested in the original post.
Cheers,
A.
(In my volunteer capacity)