Unfortunately, bigger doesn't mean better. There is no corelation between the two. Lets not assume bigger automagically means better. Its a trap. The signal to noise ratio matters.

There are tons of examples. You can have five developers doing nothing on XFree86, or a few (e.g. Keith Packard) hacking their *** off. You can have a wiki with only four main contributors and still achieve a lot. You can have a wiki with a lot of contributors not leading to much fruitful. Big communies/hierarchies (e.g. forums) can become very chaotic if there are not enough people who manage. Heck, if biggest meant best a certain corporation starting with the M of monopoly would have released the best products past years. Look at history. The biggest rulers like Napoleon have fallen even though they had huge territory. In Napoleon's case it was due to overconfidence/arrogance. Nevermind the other big cultures throughout earth's history. The dinosaurs, the Greeks, the Romans, and so on.

To put it vaguely: big things come and go. Things wither away as new things start. Thats an ecosystem, and you can find this back in a lot of aspects in life. Nature, for example. The role described in my previous post is a manager role. Linus Torvalds is a manager, too. At least, nowadays he is. He's hardly an engineer or developer anymore. He also stood up to develop GIT when it was necessary. A manager, or a leader, if you will.

Some managers who keep track of both forums and merge & compile data back and forth. The people who do this have to be comfortable on both forums, and comfortable doing the task. If it doesn't feel right to be on both or to fullfill this task; don't. After all, you're a volunteer.

The point? Developers are often bad UI designers, and bad managers as well. With only developers you won't get far. You need managers, leaders, shepherds, too.

The proposition consumer-ready or not consumer-ready is in itself a false one because it isn't a yes/no question; it is far more complex than that. Following is a rough take on it. You need users too. New people, like kids, are very honest in their experience. They won't take reasoning like 'it works for me' or 'it will be fixed in the next version' or 'I like it this way and if you don't, write a patch' for granted. They will be honest in their user experiences which is potentially a great source of feedback for developers. Also, they paid for the device, and feel it should work the way they want it to. They usually don't want all kind of addons, but what is there must work. So, the default hardware & software has to be top notch. It isn't, because there are many small and big bugs floating around. OTOH, theres also lots of improvements, too. I feel as it is, there is much work to be done on especially the software level, and I feel this is one of the reasons the NIT is not widely consumer-ready.