It's interesting that you say that about Lua, because it actually does have a strong central control and organization for the language itself. The "problem" is

It's interesting that you say that about Lua, because it actually does have a strong central control and organization for the language itself. The "problem" is that it doesn't go further than the language, large parts of the community disagree with their choices, and they tend to not care about backwards compatibility too much. Lisp is very different in that area. I think that is because the language standard is large and doesn't change. As long as people want to conform to that standard, splitting up too much doesn't really make sense.