[...] Perhaps people
who get most of their news from this mailing list are [...]
Why does this matter? What other sources are there?
It seems you're saying there is a divide between the main development
community (on this list) and some other unspecified group which
communicates by some other unspecified means. If so, what you need is
not a dictator or an architect or a process, it's a reunification.
Whoever has knowledge of such a divide can help with simple steps, in
particular by publishing a "map" outlining this divide on a
mediawiki.org page.
[...] the vast majority
of the WMF staff developers, even if they were unpopular here on this
list? Given our staff/not ratio [...]
See above.
[...] It could be that the general pessimism about the
direction
of MediaWiki (or lack thereof) is not shared out here. [...]
See above.
have their own ideas about
what things should be priorities, but have no expectation that those
ideas will be considered for resourcing.
The solution here seems rather straightforward, if not simple: ensure
the architecture committee actually feels empowered. The WMF could
promise to not invest resources on something that the committee
officially declared a bad idea, for instance.
Nemo