I have to say, being the sole maintainer of a project the size, complexity and popularity of Views is one of those experiences that I can't really recommend to most developers. It requires a lot of skills and talents, many of which I possess. Just not all the time.

One of the hardships is the size of the issue queue. No matter how hard anyone works on a package, there are simply always going to be issues, especially during this phase. But in open source, when it's just me and the people I can convince/cajole into helping, the number of issues goes up. Particularly in the edge cases, or the rough edges of the UI where maybe I didn't think things through completely. Or more likely, the second degree ramifications of a decision that ripple out and affect things that are clear once everything is in place, but during the envisioning phase, maybe weren't quite so clear.

On the other hand, there are also rewards. One of the rewards is that there are a lot of people who actually do work in the Views issue queue. Due to the sheer volume, sometimes it doesn't feel like it, but the fact is that there are a lot of issues that open and are closed that I don't ever have to look at, and due to time constraints instead of commenting on the issue I just skip them because I'm trying to get through 50 new messages and still have time to perform some actual development work that day. (And yes, there are days where I do no development work, I spend my entire work day in the issue queue trying to figure out the more difficult issues).

There are also people who have been helping test and work with Views 2 for long enough that they're clearly starting to really grok the code, and as I follow their progress with the bugs they report and the patches they submit, I can see the growth of their knowledge of the systems put into place. And I have to admit, this is something I really appreciate, because this is leading to improvements to the code that are things I might not even have seen, or possibly even have known about.

In particular, a drupal.org user who goes by the name mooffie (who clearly has been around for quite some time from the relatively low user ID) has been submitting a regular stream of small patches that have been progressing from trivial changes to downright interesting fixes.

I, personally, have a narrow focus, which means that I tend to do a poor job of acknowledging and thanking for people's contributions, which is actually a bad thing in open source. And I think it's important that I try to make sure I do acknowledge these contributions. And in one sense, it's not entirely right to single out mooffie for this, when there are actually many contributors, but a patch I just saw today particularly impressed me with the detailed explanation of what's wrong and what was fixed. That kind of attention to detail is rare (heck, I'm not sure I have it) and deeply appreciated.

So, thanks mooffie!