Wow, thanks for the thoughtful feedback. Lots of good thoughts here. I don’t have time for a detailed response just now so let me just jot down some thoughts:
First, regarding the name “spitballing”, I think perhaps “brainstorming” would be a more widely understood choice (I’ve now seen two non-native speakers complain about it, so it seems like spitballing is clearly a confusing term).
Second, regarding the other detailed points, it occurs to me that the RFC process is probably not dissimilar from a lot of other design discussions, in that it is a bit hard to tell in advance just how everything is going to feel. I think it would probably make sense, before we convert wholesale to any new process, to do some kind of “trial run”, where we experiment with the new mechanisms. This would also give us time to try a variety of RFCs (both simple and complex, for example) and work out the kinks. I suspect we’ll immediately find a desire to make adjustments, no matter what system we wind up with.