No idea if I understand you correctly, but for me you were asking for two things (probably meaning the same to you or others as well)
1) More input by the community.
2) Changes made by some developers are probably just thrown in by THEM, are not based on what the community thinks/thought (but what the developer thinks) and makes the game worse in some aspects (your example was the missing "public" option in the menu for example).
About 1)
This is probably starting now. What you have to know is that some things or ideas are easy to implement, some are not. If you had a closer look at the forums you would have seen quite a few posts that start with "new game mode idea" or similar. However, these people have no f*cking idea how to make these modifications, gamemodes, or whatever they are asking for. So instead, some of the regular developers read the idea, and in few cases the ideas are actually good and are also taken over and implemented. But in most cases they ideas itself are flawed (well they are judged to be flawed just by looking at the text description) or there simply is no developer or artist who is interested enough in implementing/realizing this kind of modification. Each developer does this for fun. I've also implemented a few features (tourney mod), but only because I was really really interested in them, and all the other developers didn't bother about it (which is fine!). If anyone would have come to me and asked me for things I don't even bother a little bit (portal gun, race mode, hook, ....) I would not have done anything for these things either. You need to keep in mind that this project is made for free and coders will only code something if they are interested in it by themselves. You can't make them to do things they don't want theirself.
So this was the explanation why it can't be like in your example of the audio app where coding-newbies (in your case: audio experts that don't know how these systems are programmed deep inside but just use it) ask for new features and OTHER coders do it volontarily. This won't be the case in nexuiz. The realisation of things asked for can take a massive amount of time (depending on how much effort is needed for a particular request) and if the ones who could do it don't want to do it, you can't make them doing it either.
However, as divverent left the boat (as captain
) this forces more involvment from the community (the ordinary players) which is a good thing. These players are the ones who also have these the ideas of usual ordinary players, ideas that they might still miss in Nexuiz. The more ordinary players become developers, the more features you, oskar, will get.
About 2)
There used to be REGULAR test builds of the current state of Nexuiz that were uploaded to a site. These builds were advertised in these forums all the time. The developers can blame all the ordinary players who don't bother reading the forums for any further complaints like "uhh why did you change that [whine]". It's not their fault.
The only thing I was missing, though, was that the new builds were simply tossed out without any further detailed changelog or notice. I would have liked it to see at least the SVN log attached to every new build appearing on the upload site.