MediaWiki needs technical ledership that people can rely on to direct the development of MediaWiki.
- There is no team assigned to core development. From the outside, it seems that the assumption is that core will somehow magically improve without coordination. I don't think this is the case
- ArchCom and the RfC process are currently not set up to fill that gap. Both the RfC process and ArchCom's decisions happen very early, before implementation of a feature acutally starts.
- Things like slipping a completely new authentication mechanism into MW 1.27 happen without coordination and predictable roadmap. In this specific case, this will cause a lot of self installed MediaWikis to break.