Another project I'd fund: Making Django an async-first (not async-only) framework over the next decade. It's easier to mix sync code into async than the other way around.
It's more straightforward to call a sync function from an async function than the other way around. That's a pretty uncontroversial statement. Adding async support to a library doesn't mean starting starting over.
I'm not fully understanding your thought. Can you say more?
The #1 reason I use Django is stability. I have projects that span 4 major Django version without any significant break. That's quite a feature.