It’s always only had a handful of real devs dedicating time to it. A whole site like this is kind of a huge undertaking, especially when you’re deciding to build it from the ground up in a modern language like Rust, and on top of a relatively new API set, ActivityPub.

Even from early on, I remember lots of discussion from people with database management credentials who were basically pounding their heads going “why are you guys doing it this backwards way?” I don’t follow the development super closely so I don’t know if those issues were resolved or not. I just remember a lot of discussion on it when I was first on Lemmy on a different instance.

Anyway, the short point of what I’m saying is they probably have a plan that makes sense to them, but without more external poking on certain things, they will work on what they think is important first, which may not always line up with what the community thinks is important.