Very true. While we continue developing tools and processes helping the mainly professional developers deal better with the higher priority tasks, the long tail of lower priority tasks that are not even considered in anybody's backlogs keeps growing.
We need to be better at
- providing mechanisms for external contributors to identify low priority tasks that should be promoted in project backlogs
- promoting easy tasks suitable for new / casual / junior contributors
- connecting popular priorities with maintainers' plans
- reviewing contributions fast (see T78768)
- closing marginal tasks that clearly have little to no chance to be addressed ever
What else? And which specific actions can we take here and now to start solving the problem?
See Also (though not "low priority" per se):
T113706: Define Cut-off date for abandoning old changesets in our code review tool (abandoning a rotting changeset = declining a rotting task?)
T105942: Come up with potential criteria for scoring project/task ideas
T107833: Build an initial work backlog for Community Tech based on one or more existing community wishlists