davegravy,
as long as there is no specific supporting business behind a project, I as an open source developer (poohh, what a statement, /me a dev, and OSS dev never the less...), work on the stuff, I like to work on. And I got the feeling, most people in the -devel channel do the same thing.
This does not mean, the project will be disjointed, on the contrary. We test each others stuff, we talk about each others stuff. That's how we get progress.
A very good example is los93sol's work on the asterisk problems. He started using the telecom part of the system, and could not stand the issues. So he learned about asterisk, the dialplan, and so on, talked in -devel about his findings, and about the way he would fix things, and everybody took turns in shooting down his ideas. But he prevailed
AND fixed a lot of bugs in doing so.
To go back in time, before the 710 release, I wanted to get the Maemo orbiter more easily installable. So I went ahead, and build deb packages (after spending a week or so trying to understand things (I am a very slow learner)), and in the end, we had a maemo Orbiter, people could install by selecting it from a web site.
That's how it works. That's how it will continue to work.