I clicked on this thread because I knew exactly what I wanted to comment about, and was surprised to see that Chris mentioned exactly it in his message:

>After several discussions generating more heat than light, when my formal proposal review comments and concerns were ignored by the unilateral accepts, and the general challenges with transparency working with core team, I decided that my effort was triggering the same friction with the same people, and thus I was just wasting my time.

I stopped paying attention to Swift for this exact reason. I have actually submitted and implemented a feature in Swift and I think it was one of my most frustrating experiences with open-source projects. It seems that almost every thread in this forum devolves into people fighting over the most irrelevant details, and my proposal specifically took months to be submitted into review because a couple of users simply refused to back down from how they personally wanted it to work, ignoring the actual problem the feature aimed to solve. After a long time deflecting the comments, the feature was accepted the way I originally intended and I never entered the forum again.

Example aside, it doesn't take a proposal to see that almost every thread in the forum looks like this. Open sourcing Swift has benefits, but I think when it comes to the actual progress of the project, this particular democratic process was a mistake.