Comment Re:"bring the missing functionality back in future (Score 4, Insightful) 30
Open source doesn't rely simply on users making code changes, it relies on a specific subset of users. Feature developers are users who are also coders and who are also able to get up to speed on the project and who are also skilled enough to implement it and are also able to navigate the politics of the project.
If the feature didn't get implemented, that person for the original implementation has probably already left the project long ago. In many cases because they weren't a supporter of the re-architecture.
It could be because a given feature-developer wanted the production release before they wanted that feature, which would sound plausible if it were one or two significant features left behind. But once you have to start counting the missing major functionality on more than one hand, that points more at the fundamentals of the re-architecture than personal feature-developer priorities.