Yeah, there are definitely areas where the community wants to help but Jolla is either not willing or able to accept the help. For example:

• translations - the promised official translation platform still does not exist but unofficial translations efforts are ongoing on Transifex
• application development by the community - most community apps are still blocked from Harbour
• bug hunting - still hampered by the lack of proper public bug tracker, TJC is a mess for this and people might start not to bother if reports on TJC rot for months without any reaction
• TOH development - this is definitely moving forward, but pretty much without any cooperation from Jolla after the initial hardware enablement and SDK
• cooperation on Sailfish OS development - this is definitely improving, as the recent community contributed Conmann hotfix shows, but it is still hampered by components being undocumented, not really having any upstream, lacking a roadmap or being outright closed thus making contributions impossible
• low level development - at least until recently was pretty much completely blocked by the lack of a flashable image

So I would say one can't really blame the community for being too passive - there are certainly people willing to help, but quite often can't until Jolla does their part of the "deal".