This is the most difficult part of FOSS projects, and why relatively few of them match commercial products in quality or usability. FOSS programming tends to b

This is the most difficult part of FOSS projects, and why relatively few of them match commercial products in quality or usability. FOSS programming tends to be largely recreational or a labor of love, and a lot of the discipline and organization required to make good software is not fun, and will be actively avoided in recreational projects, especially for people who do the "not fun" parts of projects in their day job. A really successful project has to have someone (or several someones) at its head who can organize everyone and keep things moving in the right direction. Part of this is being willing and able to say "no" even if it means someone may walk away from the project. If you want to produce really, really good open source software, provide a stipend for the programmers so they don't need to keep day jobs and pay market rate for a small number of managers with the skill to organize, the charisma to get agreement from the team, and the knowledge of when to tell people "no".