[thomersch_]

OSM is more like a community of communities: There are people mapping with very diverse value systems (ranging from underserved people to semantic data aficionados), groups and corporations building software, volunteers running the servers etc. Making a decision with such a large body of people with very different interests can be very troublesome, but this is something you have to deal with.

A central point of the ecosystem is the editing software: This is the gateway through which people will touch the data and can massively steer the data and thus the community into a certain direction. E.g. if you throw a validation error on every object which doesn't have a name, soon all objects will have names.

There are several editors available for OSM, but iD is the most prominent one at the moment, as it will be presented to you if you click the "Edit" button on osm.org. Thus people developing iD have a large burden to carry. And there is the growing disconnect that the author is writing about: A small group (in other words: two people) control in which direction the project is being steered. And with a complaint from within the community, one of the maintainers has disabled the issue tracker for the general public. (Edit: Issue tracker has been reopened now)

Making a decision with everyone involved is hard and takes a lot of effort, but at the moment we have a situation in which very few decide without the mandate of the community.

Hope I could shed some light (though it's late over here).