voting will not solve the problem , popularity factor is already one of causes of problem. The problem stems from lack of fair way of defining how critical a given issue is. Right now everything to do with D7 currently gets most attention, leaving the bugs in production releases with lack of attention from the community. There should be a queue based on a factor which defines fairness something like this , Secuity > known bug/patch > issue core > module Current Stable version ( 6) > last stable version (5) > development version (7) Of course there is also a need for some kind of accountability as why a patch for a bug in production version has not been committed for x.y.z time period. But we can ignore that ...being an open source project ;) . Currently new release is favored over resolving bugs in current release.