Having more people triaging issues would also help. We get great help from some people but we could use more to reduce burden on more senior developers by being a front-line of reviewers for issues & PRs.
I agree with the frustration of waiting for reviews or merges but I also understand exactly where it comes from. For example, in the time I have available for Julia I’m working on reducing TTFX, probably the most-hated aspect of Julia’s usability. Should I set that aside to review PRs in a half-dozen areas that I know well (but am slightly bored by), or should I prioritize TTFX work? There usually isn’t time for both. Likewise, other people put enormous effort into compiler correctness & efficiency; only a few people can do that, and every hour they spend doing something else is slower progress on something more fundamental. The reason you see prioritization of certain critical bugs and specific features is that the people doing the work have identified those as the subset of things they have time and expertise to work on. For some people, “expertise” is the limiting factor, but for others it’s 100% about having enough time.
I know that submitting a PR and have it languish disincentivizes future contributions, so that’s not great either. It’s an important issue but there’s no easy solution short of having a larger number of people take responsibility for specific systems within Julia.