The announcement is a good statement of the priority being github:NixOS/nix, at least. Long term, I hope there’s more momentum there and fewer PRs being blocked for various reasons, so another part of the solution is how to continue to improve how smoothly things are running on the Nix team to get more things into core Nix.
One actual suggestion is to adopt more of an optimistic merge approach. We have this in nixpkgs with by-name. The other example listed is pessimistic merging, which seems somewhat familiar:
In the worst case, patches can wait for weeks, or months, to be accepted. Or they are never accepted. Or, they are rejected with various excuses and argumentation.
(…)
[Pessimistic merging] tells new contributors, “guilty until proven innocent,” which is a negative message that creates negative emotions. Contributors who feel unwelcome will always look for alternatives. Driving away contributors is bad. Making slow, quiet enemies is worse.
Some seriously good advice in there, we should consider it. 