I think it's a motivating factor to attract contributions.
I was catching up on C++11/14/17 after spending a lot of time in Rust recently and I realized that I see the C++ standards committee as this nameless faceless void, and the Rust team as these friendly people on GitHub and IRC. There's this college kid who thinks using "pre-pooping your pants" as a technical term is a good plan, this Brooklyn hipster who really likes communism, etc. Whether or not I endorse their "personal stuff", I have a sense that there's a community of real people and not just names on a community, and that makes Rust as a language attractive. If I want to contribute something to the language, there are people I can talk to, and there's a clear way for me, as I am, to do that. I have no idea how to propose something to C++ without working for a company that has a seat on the standards committee. Maybe there is a way, but I'm certainly not under the impression that there is a way.
Projects that are more able to attract contributions will be healthier, more technically productive, and more secure (via Linus' Law). It's meaningless to try to focus purely on the technical if you don't have the people to do the technical work.
I see C++ and Rust in the opposite way: Rust is developed by Mozilla for its needs and about as open as something from Apple, while the C++ committees include lots of respected experts, many of which popular and/or friendly.
If that were the case, much of the community-driven work going towards - for example - specific embedded targets wouldn't happen. What is the case is that one of the major users of Rust is Servo, which definitely runs into more problems at large scale then other projects.
Rust is primarily community-driven and that is a conscious choice by Mozilla. If it were primarily for Mozilla, we wouldn't run research into how production users use it.
Finally, Mozilla cannot be compared with Apple at all, for all that's bad about them, there's an extreme amount of stuff that happens very much in the open and the clear, with the possibility to influence it.
We have the discussion processes you want, but the language is 2 years old, it's certainly not comparable to C++ on that angle, yet.
Maybe, maybe not, but the point is there is a much lower barrier for people to do so whether or not there is any reason for it when it doesn't affect their livelihood.
There is also a much lower barrier for someone else to take it public for the same reason.
I was catching up on C++11/14/17 after spending a lot of time in Rust recently and I realized that I see the C++ standards committee as this nameless faceless void, and the Rust team as these friendly people on GitHub and IRC. There's this college kid who thinks using "pre-pooping your pants" as a technical term is a good plan, this Brooklyn hipster who really likes communism, etc. Whether or not I endorse their "personal stuff", I have a sense that there's a community of real people and not just names on a community, and that makes Rust as a language attractive. If I want to contribute something to the language, there are people I can talk to, and there's a clear way for me, as I am, to do that. I have no idea how to propose something to C++ without working for a company that has a seat on the standards committee. Maybe there is a way, but I'm certainly not under the impression that there is a way.
Projects that are more able to attract contributions will be healthier, more technically productive, and more secure (via Linus' Law). It's meaningless to try to focus purely on the technical if you don't have the people to do the technical work.