I'd argue that was the opposite how Firefox project worked when Blake Ross was still guiding it. Clear vision and direction, not passive wait for someone to submit something.
Without this any project just becomes a mess of patches.
That's simply not true. Maintainers exist to coordinate effort, not to do all the work themselves.
A good example is GNU Emacs. There are two maintainers, but most of the code is written by other people. Even RMS' code doesn't amount to a particularly large percentage of Emacs anymore.
