Peter, you have a good idea but you are looking at Squeak as the wrong kind of project. It is not a single application that does one thing. The individual applications built in Squeak *do* have a small team of dedicated programmers: EToys, Croquet, Scratch, the Berne group, Squat, L, etc. etc.
But for Squeak as a whole? A better analogy, as I've often argued, is to compare it to a Linux distribution. Squeak as a whole needs to support all of us working together using the same basic code base. Squeak-as-a-whole fails if everyone forks off and uses their own Squeak, never to re-merge. But heck, even if that happens, it's not the end of the world. It only means we are more like Scheme than like Debian, with everyone pursuing independent, incompatibly paths. The ideas will still be in each independent path.
(And given this, I think we should model our processses after linux distributions, or after SE processes that develop *suites* of applications, not after SE processes or open source groups that are building *individual* applications.)
Lex
PS -- why do we see so many depressed posts? Things seem to be progressing nicely, to me.