so the problem is, that the userland is under-represented in the development, because they usually not present on the mailing list and on irc, where discussions and decisions happen, and they usually have different priorities and expectations about the PHP language than the core devs. to make things worse, they cannot write patches for the core, and the core devs rarely work on something which they don't particularly need or like.

and I think that the only option where we can change that, is that us, the php userland devs has to be more active on the mailing lists, irc, bug tracking, writing RFCs etc.