> OP is exactly about that: if Araq is busy or absent, this should not put the > > whole project to a halt
In Ruby you have to discuss specific feature requests on the bug tracker; and matz is the final authority for approving or rejecting. I do agree in regards to bugs and fixes to documentation, but I would strongly disagree and suggest to not bypass changing functionality after extensive discussions. I also highly doubt that 4 days (!) of open PRs causes people to go away. What's the next claim, 1 hour after a PR people leave? If perceived slowness happens because of people upstream being busy, you could always try to delegate further downwards. Linus does this too; Matz in ruby does this as well to some extent (e. g. the main guy who works on mjit has quite a lot of freedom to operate without having to constantly ask whether this or that change is ok now, as long as the larger picture is kept in mind).
