Hi Timothy, I was quite weary to bring up this point, but given the sheer volume of patch-related exchanges in recent memory I feel that it may be worth bringing up as I have not yet seen it discussed (if I overlooked it, my apologies): I don't think the core problem can (or maybe should) be solved by sheer manpower alone. I would argue that the issue may be partially infrastructural in nature. This ML is incredibly active, with a lot of different people surely following it for different reasons. However, I am not entirely convinced that having patches, bug reports and general discussions all in one place is necessarily a net positive for people wanting to contribute to the project (once a project hits a certain size, at least). It lacks a certain separation of concerns that clearly informed the design of forges like GitHub (having separate "Issues" and "PRs").
I may be alone with this opinion, given manually organizing is a personal weakness of mine, and something I prefer to avoid at all costs, but I think having a separate list for patches would greatly improve their visibility without having to resort to band-aids like automated subject-based filtering schemes which are thwarted by mundane human error ("[PTACH]"). On the other hand, were I completely alone with this opinion, then we wouldn't have dozens of emacs-* mailing lists already. TL;DR: Maybe we could improve the visibility of patches by having a dedicated mailing list for them? This would also allow for a greater deal of automation in the way we deal with patches. Cheers, D.