<i>The biggest problem, I think, is that there's no vision. </i><p>from experience, open source developers don't like writing code to someone else's vision; it feels like work.  they write code to solve their own problems, according to their own vision.  if their vision correlates with an existing project's, then all the better, and they can just work on that project.  if not, they start their own.  nobody's going to sign up for a mailing list and crank out code just because someone else is asking for it.