The project was not initially designed to run as a community gallery. It was focused at two small targets: personal user site that maybe had to deal w/ other family members uploading, so required approval. The other option was smaller business showing some pictures. Over time the options expanded based on requests and all this was before I was ever involved.
The gallery is Open Source, anyone at anytime can change the source code. There are several things I had to change to even bother working with the module and in the middle of changes I was pulled out and forced to work on other things. Since then I have brought on Paul, and more recently I have been working with James who have maintained forum status while I take my hiatus to fullfill other obligations. It is not an easy thing to manage an open source team especially when you are overworked yourself. I am by no means lashing out at your chief and I think you have very valid points. What I am telling you is that there are several projects in the core which are lacking and that is because very few in this community want to contribute back to the core. There are several others who shine, but overall I see the failure here in the hands of the community and not one in the contributing core team members and leads. I spend a ridiculous amount of time working on the core forum module for nothing besides I like being a part of its evolution. In this project I code 95% of it all now. I have finally gotten some graphics help and it has been a joy working with Rob and seeing the progress. This is a prime example of someone who is contributing back.
Before clicking reply, please understand I have thought about stepping aside from the Gallery module. Unfortunately, tthere is not a single community member out of almost 350k users that have even come close to stepping up enough to take it over. (No offense James, you just got involved) I don't have a problem with this, accept that it just means the gallery module suffers in this period where I cannot get to it at all. I hate to have this attitude, but if people really want to discuss what is wrong lets not take the easy way out and blame it on the target group consisting of 30 people. There are people contributing, don't get me wrong, but why don't we look at the percentage of those contributing and the percentage of those complaining. Let's be realistic, for an open source community to thrive, the percentages have to change at least a bit.