Northwest, I was going to comment that this article is full of complaints, but doesn't offer up a single, actionable solution. I wrote a post on Medium a while back (
https://medium.com/surveillance-state/7d456a6a04df) trying to identify some of the root causes of our problems and offer up a fix. My ideas may not be the best course of action, but at least it's putting something out there.
I'd love to work on building a community that can evaluate, develop, and test out different ideas (although my time is somewhat limited right now). I'm pretty experienced developing in Python/Django, and have plans to teach myself Meteor this fall.
Let me know your thoughts.