Won't help. We have a large funnel and the end of the funnel is a committer. There is no way for the committer to catch up with all commits. We need more committers to resolve that issue.
Hard to argue with that. However - is there anyway we can make the committers job easier? and related, is there a way we can get work that in "the funnel" to keep moving farther to the end so that people don't get discouraged being stuck on the sidelines.
It'd be interesting and bazaar to see another repository of Drupal core where all CVS account holders could commit patches after review. I wonder just how broken its HEAD would be.
I agree that a free-for-all could be pretty messy (especially without a reasonable transition) but I would point out that there are lots of projects that operate with more than 2-3 committers. I believe I've seen references to projects like svn having ~150 "core" committers or apache having 100+ committers.