Interesting that this thread is still as relevant as it was two years ago. Lots of good ideas in it, too.
I would say that one part of the problem is that the people in the community, like myself, who have some amount of development ability may feel like if they choose some aspect of DP to work on, that it would amount to them de facto adopting that thing, and becoming almost totally responsible for it -- when most of us have day jobs and can't spend all of our time tending to something that is just a hobby that doesn't bring in anything but enjoyment.
For example, at one time I decided to undertake the job of theming DokuWiki to match this site's design, so that it could be seamlessly integrated into it. I got fairly far along, but other life concerns ended up crowding it out, so I became unable to work on it anymore and ViciouZ supposedly took it over (but I'm not sure if he's been able to do much with it yet either).
I could be wrong, but I feel like we need to try something that hasn't really been done much around here – developers should band together and form committees on their own to work on certain projects. That way no one developer feels like they have to be totally responsible for anything. (Aside from jitspoe, of course!)
That being said, I know we do have officially sanctioned groups like the Map Committee, as well as "the" Committee, but the problem there is keeping members involved. I'm not sure offhand what the solution is for that problem, because sometimes things in life truly do interfere, but other than that...
I think it could help to structure committees a bit more. What I mean is, it's true that some issues require involvement and maybe voting from the committee at large, but if there are any issues that can be delegated to individual members, they could be assigned out so that members could take a sense of ownership over the specific things they're assigned to do. Think of it like a work order/ticketing system, or a software bug tracking system. Some types of things, for example, could be taken care of on Github by a group of developers, as Github has great collaboration features.
Anyway, I'm just rattling off my thoughts at this point; anyone have any comments on them?
I guess what I'm saying is, in a nutshell, that we need more committees for the various aspects of the game that can be developed by someone other than Jitspoe, and we all need to put out a serious call for hobbyist developers to come and hack on our crap. Lol.