I think part of the disconnect is a perception of what’s “in progress” from “inside” versus “outside”.
Just as a minimal example, the impression of the atmosphere of interest is definitely different if you primarily consider internals, the RFC repo, the bug tracker, or just TWIR. Then there’s the slightly more closed (feeling) team processes: obviously not everyone’s present for steering/triage meetings so what’s covered there, while potentially guiding what that team considers “active”, has little to no effect on “outside” atmosphere.
It’s similar to the “pre-RFC flood” that can be felt here on irlo. A lot of medium-baked (or less) ideas get thrown around here but never make it to the RFCs repo, due in part to both a gating of thought provided here and a lack of interest in putting forth the effort to push it forward. RFC (issues) that don’t see team interaction are similar in that if they’re open and “community effort” goes into them, the “atmosphere” is that they’re “open” and taking some “cost” to host (even if that’s just real-estate on a digital issue tracker) even if the team isn’t going to look at it for a year due to other priorities.
This isn’t the entire reason for this “flooded” atmosphere, definitely. But I think at the very least it is a part of the disconnect leading one party to say “the system is working” and the other that it isn’t in respect to managing the flood of opinions that public consensus-driven design is.
(off-topic EDIT: I had no idea irlo had cake day icons, this is the first time I’ve seen them (on me).)