Nothing quite like seeing the sausage get made. But, the open discussion, while perhaps unnerving, is certainly preferred (IMHO) to a closed source development process happening behind closed doors. A bit of chaos is the price to pay for the open process.

Command-and-control does have some advantages. And maybe as Postgres grows, the advantages related to a more orderly process become more visible. (For the record, I think Postgres is a fantastic RDBMS + JSON store)