@vyr So the abbreviated history is that historically there has been an almost 100% overlap between Element and Matrix core folks. They claimed to want to solve this, but attempts at actually doing so were constantly rejected out of hand.

Large amounts of contributors offered to help with spec stuff, but the core spec team insisted on keeping a small spec team, even though they could not keep up with the workload. Proposed process improvements were routinely ignored with comments like "we do not feel this is necessary right now".

Two people in particularly (Matthew and Travis) have continuously pulled governance authority towards themselves, and seem unwilling to trust anyone else to take over any part of the process, causing the whole process to stall on their combined capacity, which simply isn't enough to maintain such a large protocol.

All the while Element has had a very capital-intensive development process, partly due to their insistence on prioritizing feature development over resolving technical debt, despite rapidly mounting maintenance costs and everything being constantly on fire. I have personally warned them repeatedly of the outcome of this approach, and I know that others have too.

What it boils down to is that they have refused outside help that didn't exactly fit into their vision at every turn, ignored just about every warning they've gotten because they were sure they knew better, and have chosen to centralize the process to such a degree that it was never going to run sustainably.

In the years that I have attempted to be involved with Matrix, I have seen at least several obviously more sustainable development models proposed, some but not all of them my own, and none of them were seriously considered. Instead they continued to insist on a highly institutional process that excluded most potential contributors a priori (I can go into more detail on that if wanted).