When 0.6 was released, there was an all-time record of open JIRAs -- something like 90-100 (I closed maybe 10 quickly.) It's just math: there is a certain level of interest and rate of new requests and issues. There is some level of committer time and energy available to work on them. The former is just getting larger and the latter is shrinking. Neither of these things are the problem per se, and neither is something to be fixed; you can't ask people to not have ideas or issues, and you can't tell people they should be contributing more here.
But I do think it means that it's more urgent than ever to have some strategy to tackle the JIRA, rather than talk about more green-field plans. This has been discussed before, and there were ideas like new JIRA tags, but I don't think it's been more than some labeling of the problem. There haven't been new committers, and JIRA rot is discouraging new ones, which makes it worse. JIRA is really a symptom; there is just a lot of sprawl and cruft to the project that's not being talked about or addressed. I can't say don't write down any new plans in JIRA. I can only point out what's happened many times: big ideas go half implemented if at all. Writing them down isn't really useful work. Meanwhile, I can see ten JIRAs from new contributors that have been ignored, and, many new bug reports are avoidable, jsut symptoms of scattered un-unified code that was never refined. It won't be different if this cycle is repeated. It's not going to kill this project but it's not going to get out of AAA to the Major Leagues at this rate, and that is frustrating. Fortunately, I think this remains pretty solvable. More work on existing issues sure helps, but nobody can count on that. It's then a question of scope: narrowing scope to something maintainable, making that scope clear, turning down JIRAs that don't fit, focusing attention on actionable JIRAs that do. Yes, you have to be able to not-do things in a project as well as do things, even in open source. I think that scope is still large at "maintaining what exists already, and fixing it up". Since I think this is the only realistic approach to a next version, in this conversation I could not support anything approach that pretends to do five more things in the next version -- at least not unless accompanied by some plan to address the contributions already in line in JIRA. It's not OK to be implicitly rejecting so much from the community by not planning to fix that first and foremost.
