What's interesting to me is that we had a similar issue in OpenFrameworks a couple of years ago. As the community grew, more and more people wanted to contribute but there was a lack of focus and the priorities of the project were hidden by the core devs. We've had a couple of developer conferences/meetups where decisions were made on how to best handle the needs of the core people who started the project while opening up overall development to capitalize on the experience of others outside of the core group.  

I must admit there were times where I wanted to fork OF or split off development in some other way, but instead I decided to knuckle down and see if we could work things out. I think it's worth a try in Pd. Even if it takes a bunch of work up front, it will be worth it in the long run.

It's been an involved social process but, overall, we are moving ahead quite well. There is a public roadmap, community action leaders (audio, 3d, graphics, linux, etc), a robust forum, etc. GitHub has been amazing helpful in this area is probably one of the main tools that makes this collaboration possible.

There have been missteps and there are still issues to resolve, but we're getting there. For instance, there will be a Documentation sprint at CMU in a few weeks.