I've made quite a few requests for new features, etc...and I didn't ask the en.wiki community first.
What kind of requests are you talking about? There is a big difference between asking for a change to the site's configuration for user permissions and asking for a new magic word to let you display the latest football results automagically. The former type of requests require community approval and have done for years, the latter kind have nothing to do with the community - the community can, of course, choose not the use them, but deciding what features to add to the code is completely up the developers.