Summary: This sounds like a bad idea. 1. Dries doesn't need a special status to prioritize the attention he gives to issues - he knows his priorities without changing a form element. 2. Dries' priorities aren't kept secret from the rest of us - he communicates them through drupal-dev emails, blog posts, issue queue updates, DrupalCon talks, etc. Pay particular attention to emails with subject lines like "code freeze - I think these issues are important". 3. Issue queue management will never be improved by adding more work to the core committers, of which there are only three on the development branch. It is a failing strategy. 4. Discussing issue queue strategy is rarely productive - like most Drupal issues imo, we don't need more talk, just more effort from the community. Non-committers need to step up to submit better patches and give better reviews, myself included. Case closed. Cog Rusty wrote:
I wonder if the concerns about bottlenecks and decentralization could be addressed if Dries habitually marked some patches as "non-strategic" and left them to others. Perhaps then the "strategic" patches could get earlier feedback and guidance.
Correcting bugs or code style could be considered "non-strategic", but of course the line can depend on a few things, not the least of which is the available time to spend.