Why Russ is wrong
After recovering from the shock of seeing “consensus” spelled correctly for a change, I thought I should respond to some claims of healthiness.
Package fiefdoms waste people's time quite frequently: MIA processing, duplicated effort in DELAYED NMUs, conspiracy and infighting, trying to get an absentee maintainer to respond, the ridiculous things that happen when a maintainer is still around but not doing his job for 3 consecutive years, and so on. Having all packages maintained by "Debian Developers" is a great idea.
The current hierarchy might work better than some lesser evils, but that doesn't mean it's good at all. We should strive toward ZERO hierarchy, not some magical fiction where people imagine themselves wiser than everyone else because their drinking buddies said so.
The anti-consensus features in Debian would better be replaced by a real solution to the problem pervading nearly all free software projects: ego.