Drupal is in an interesting place right now. For the last few months I've been saying that we have all the pressures of a large commercial software project with none of the resources.
Working on core takes time. Writing patches takes time, reviewing them takes time, just keeping track of what all is going on takes time. Most of us are volunteers but the most valuable thing that I lack as an initiative lead is raw hours.
I'm currently chasing a wild goose of an idea in Drupal 7, and found myself in a situation where it would be really convenient to run the Drupal install script through a debugger.