As I build more business than blog sites with WordPress, this was I thought a really interesting show!

I agree that better role management would be a very welcome feature in WordPress. I personally don't need anything terribly drastic, I'd like to see basic groups so that I could restrict users to a certain category, or a specific Page and it's children. I think maybe a bit more fine-grained control in core to lay the groundwork; and something more more advanced, one of the two plugins they mentioned, as a canonical plugin would be sufficient.

I feel their pain, and I'm sure the pain of many others, when it comes to clients and end users balking at the idea of blogging. I learned quickly to not even mention blogs to them and to just strip the comment features out of the theme, and removed all mention of blog or blogroll and rebrand the whole blog feature as just plain old "news". It makes some end users feel more comfortable and lets them ease into blogging without even knowing it :)

Hopefully this one isn't a trick question! There are five names listed on the About WordPress page as lead developers who I assume are all able to commit to core: Ryan Boren, Mark Jaquith, Matt Mullenweg, Andrew Ozz, & Peter Westwood.