But there's a difference between an issue and a solution. Yes, the templating system is broken, and I'm sure many an editor will confirm that, but just because a system is broken does not mean Lua is automatically the solution. To put it in other words: just because people want a better templating system does not imply they want Lua. What discussion, if any, has there been that WMF wikis want Lua as their templating replacement. As said before, mediawiki.org is mostly developers, so there's no problem with that, but with the op-ed on the Signpost, we should seriously question whether the community wants this feature before randomly forcing it on them.
Which community should be consulted on this technical decision? What if enwiki wants prolog and dewiki wants lua and enwikitionary wants javascript? Occasionally technical decisions have to be made by the developers. The templating language is a technical decision. It's really not something that is up for editor community debate.
This decision was hashed out over months (really a couple of years if we consider the original iteration of this idea) with the developer community. If the editor community wishes to take part in these kinds of decisions, they should join wikitech-l.
- Ryan