Just wanted to respond via the planet on one thing:
It is getting increasingly hard to get new stuff into Gnome, and when someone approaches with something that is slightly controversial huge flamewars erupt. Consider Tracker and Empathy on the desktop-devel list and the recent “incident” on the gtk-devel list.
Ignoring Tracker (too long ago and I’d rather see that standard used instead of deciding between Tracker/Beagle), I don’t think the other examples are good. For one, the gtk-devel list was not regarding getting new stuff into GNOME. Further, the flamewar started because the person was clearly trolling (I had to resort to moderating!). The idea itself did not cause the flamewar.
Empathy has a few issues (not using gnome-keyring and the license). This doesn’t support your statement. If those are fixed, I’d give a +1 during the r-t meeting. From the last time we discussed Empathy, I felt these two items was the only reason Empathy wasn’t accepted.
Every release cycle we accept a few things into GNOME. We do ask for a certain quality, e.g. making releases on time and responding to the incoming bugs. Sometimes a proposed module only made one release on time. We do look at future possibilities of a certain module (good enough and shows promise is what I look for), but the basics shouldn’t be ignored.