Being officially sociocratic is a kind of formalism which clearly mislead the process itself, it would ruin opportunities. Formalism is opposed to incrementalism (https://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/publik_267101.pdf).
Keeping formalism minimal optimize complex problems solving. That’s why it can seem chaotic like you said, there’s not a single way to do, “it depends on the people” in some way, and democracy vs sociocracy is just a picture to characterize the differences.
For someone with a background like mine, the process is cristal clear and optimal, the match with sociocracy is concrete.
For ex. when I see a subject like that: Are there any plans for Julia to adopt an effects system?
It’s a classic heuristic of pre-feature request, you test if the idea can get traction and start to build a “circle” of interested people around a problem. When those people collaborate often to solve alike problems, a “mission circle” emerge. Julia Data is a typical example of mission circle, it has even its own domain name: https://juliadata.org
Another characteristic of sociocracy (or incremental problem solving) and why decisions are taken by consent, is because consensus produce soft decisions that rarelly fully satisfy someone.
Base rules embrace the fact we cannot satisfy everyone so they consist of being transparent about your intention, listening to everyone IN the circle, and if there’s no formal opposition, do your stuff to test your idea.
Once the decision is taken everybody should support it, because the aim is to genuinely experiment the idea and avoid to sabotage its testing by making resistance.
Juleps cited earlier is a typical example of this kind of experiment. It didn’t work, but it was worth trying and now we know it’s not the way to do for us, we learnt, we move on.
This is also probably why @ToucheSir (sorry to cite you directly, correct me if I’m wrong) muted the recent thread about ScopedValue. As the decision has been taken, even if we disagree, we should support his idea. If we don’t, we can obfuscate the reasons of a failure (or a success) and ruin a learning opportunity. Now it’s too late to talk about the name, it’s time to use it and collect enough feedback to maybe improve it later with new informations. Once again this is typical of how sociocracy works, but let’s not be reductive by naming something, it’s just better to keep it as a simple picture and not to make it a formal process.
Now that being said, the actual issue is about: where should Julia feature requests go ?
From a sociocratic perspective this is not an issue, this is a feature 
In democracy every voice counts, in sociocracy relevant voices count. To be relevant means you’re durably involved in a circle of people and collaborate with them to achieve a common goal. You cannot collaborate with random people, you have to know them and share the same goal, otherwise this is just cooperation.
Having a fixed answer on where should Julia features requests go, means you decide for all circles how they should be organized to permit random people to contribute.
Why do you want that ? You accept their contribution and then who’s responsible to maintain it ? Do we have enough core contributors and are they willing to spend their precious time on thousands of random1234user you’ll never see again to check and maintain their maybe relevant contribution…? How do you know if process X is better than process Y ? in which situation ? A ? B ? or C which has not happened yet and is not previsible ? …
No judgement, I understand some can feel uncomfortable with incertainty and look at following clear directives, it’s how it’s done on most projects to communicate and reassure people; the idea that everyone can contribute is beautifull too and I sincerely wish everybody can… but sorry, this is not realistic, it’s a huge amount of additional work for core developers, we know the ideal team size is between 4 and 7 persons (due to information propagation…), that experienced teams define their own methods toward a problem and that enforcing one globally reduce motivation and bride problem solving capacity…
So I believe it’s good to keep this question open, let people find their way on how to contribute without impersonating relationships, and let teams being organized the way they want to discover what’s working for them. Diversity is a gift.
There’s too much to say, I’ve sincerely tried to make it short 
@mnemnion sorry you have an issue to compile julia on mac, I would help you with pleasure if I could.