There's also the fact that a lot of things are said to be not on the agenda because other things are more important. It's one thing to say that to someone who just happens to be asking, but when you're telling someone who wants to help code, "No, you can't come work on that because other stuff is more important," it's not like they're necessarily going to just fall in line and code what you tell them! If someone has a choice between "code this small thing that I can do and learn from" or "eat some lasagna while watching Community," and they're told, "Well, you can't code that one small thing, but you can work on this monstrous project that looks intimidating and out of your reach," then pretty much the only people who benefit are lasagna ingredient manufacturers. Certainly the archive isn't benefitting by turning would-be programmers away before they even get to the door, and neither are archive users.

Blah blah blah hey choir how ya doin'. :)