Having been “on the inside” at the time, I can confirm that the focus on “more community” was very real, also personally to Karen. There was a dedicated team to work on aligning the development more with the community.

However, things changed and today most of the people on that team have left or were laid off. (I can think of Lenz still being there, but think most others have left.) Karen of course also is not there anymore either.

What has been weird to witness was that you need a dedicated team to open up a development process that had become closed from public view. We actually have this problem in Monty Program too, it is easy for everyone to fall back to their old MySQL habits and not communicate openly enough with the rest of the world.