I too felt the management of the community contribution in the project was kind of poor. At least that's what I saw last year; now sure how it's now since I didn't follow it after my enthusiasm waned and moved on. I still believe Rust is a very promising project and wait for its final release before doing anything.
Unclear design/coding/development guidelines on contribution submission resulted in effort wasted in developing the contribution. Slow review process. Took more than a month and repeated requests to get a resolution. Arbitrary rigid design decision that couldn't be circumvented even when resulted in bugs. No channel for design decision escalation in the event of a disagreement.
At least that's what I've encountered before. May be now is better. The thing for community contributors is that we all have other jobs to do. After spent huge amount of effort in development and exhaustive testing and the review process went nowhere, I just didn't care to bother about it anymore.
Dang, that's a shame. I've generally had a good experience, and been impressed with the speed at which changes are reviewed and merged, but it only takes several instances to tarnish everything. If you can link to a specific issue/PR, I can pass it on. The team has been generally very good at fixing governance issues when they arise.
