Just to throw my experience into this discussion - I primarily see two reasons why developers rather create new projects instead of joining forces: First and foremost: An existing project does not adhere to Drupal Coding Standards, contains almost no or meaningless documentation, or does not use Drupal's APIs. Second: An existing project looks and "feels" unmaintained. Its issue queue is bloated by unresolved and even unrecognized issues. If there are any follow-ups from the maintainer, they tend to be meaningless or ignorant. While the first one is a technical one and may be prevented/solved by automation (scripting), the second is more related to the personal opinion and/or available time of a maintainer, which can only be clarified in a discussion. AFAIK, we don't have a dedicated container at d.o to publicly discuss only such project/co-maintainer topics, where everyone is able to track them (RSS) and participate. Recently, I've seen a third cause for duplicate projects: New/novice Drupal developers who do not seem to check contributions for already existing projects - or - developers who wrote a custom module for client/project xyz without checking contributions for similar modules/APIs up front, which they really want to contribute back, possibly only to gain some "contributor points". Daniel