As the person who has, rightly or wrongly, effectively been the one who ended up forcing the decision about what MTA and desktop are the default in Debian, I really like Gravity's idea of a Debian steering committee. I've never felt comfortable making these kind of decisions on my own, and using debian-devel to try to make a legitimate decision (as was done with the MTA and attempted(?) with the default vi) has been a PITA.

(I was actually going to rant about this exact thing during my lightning talk @ DebConf, but felt too mellow that day for the rant.)

FWIW, I'm not suprised to see Ubuntu people leaving Debian. I've been working to fix many large (technical) issues in the project since I joined it, and I feel like I have, but it's hardly been easy. And while I feel that this means that only the good ideas have survived to be implemented, driving a big change in Debian is still very hard, and so I'm not suprised to see people associated with a distribution that makes change easier feeling happier working on it.

But, this pressure for Ubuntu to diverge from Debian makes the chances of merging back many changes seem even more slim, and makes me wonder when it will turn into a total fork. Which concerns I've probably talked about enough before.