Hello John,
I fully agree with you and indeed I just wanted to make this a topic for the board meeting in January. But I think a discussion, or even a site on meta, where we can discuss and elaborate this, would be very very good. We have developers from community, mainly they make what they think is just important for them. Mostly MediaWiki grew in the past in this way. But now we also have employees, and I think they should work more purposefully and keep their concentration on features that are considered by the community as important.
So, please keep the discussion here and on meta on. That would be great.
Ting