2c from a Discourse team member: Perhaps (1) would be better served by an Internals discussion? I'm merely a casual observer of Rust so I don't have a complete picture of your process, but Step 1 strikes me as primarily conversational, which is specifically the type of interaction Discourse is built for. Also:
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We now support Webhooks which could facilitate all sorts of nifty GitHub integrations.
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We support GitHub linkbacks.
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Although not perfect, our automated summarizations of topics can help skim-readers get reasonably up to speed. I think manual recaps - which @dikaiosune has set the gold standard for - is still an invaluable resource that can't be automated, but would at least always show up in these summaries thanks to a high like count.
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I've previously specced out a plugin proposal for "Manually curated topic summaries". This isn't something the Discourse team is likely to work on, but if someone from the Rust/Discourse community makes it there's a good chance we'll support it.
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Similarly, other custom workflow features like for example RFC voting might make their way into Discourse if such a feature is applicable to software development forums in general.
I welcome all Rust enthusiasts to engage with us in #feature on Meta to make a case for more software development-oriented features in Discourse. And we welcome the core Rust team to talk to us directly if there's anything we can do together in this space as a joint effort.