I suspect there’s flexibility. The hints dropped have included picking up some of what @renestach once did, and this predates me, but the old web site has some clues in the form of the sort of feature-oriented publicity that you might have been looking for. 2nd beta version of Duplicati 2.0 now available made it to current forum home, and you can also see his public-facing work in the forum Announcements category.
Then there’s the behind-the-scenes task of deciding what goes where in terms of something like GitHub branches, and maybe deciding when it’s time to release what. There are also some hints of planning of directions based on surveys. Rene also participated in general forum discussions, and sought feedback.
Get In Touch describes some of the early Duplicati history. I think @kenkendk was mostly writing code. Contributors to duplicati/duplicati shows the history with a large set of infrequent contributors (who need some way to contribute without having to learn about a complicated process), and frequent contributors who could perhaps guide. You can see current frequent contributors on the release notices whose style recently (probably due to change of writer) is more at the code level. I think both styles have their value.
Thanks for dupReport by the way. A lot of above looks much like what you’re doing. To quote your page
Bug reports and feature requests can be made on GitHub in the Issues Section. Please do not issue pull requests before discussing any problems or suggestions as an Issue.
The discussion group for dupReport is on the Duplicati Forum in this thread.
Please follow dupReport on Twitter @dupReport
and above that, I see you talk about your code branches and what inspired the plan. Duplicati’s is more user-facing, but Channels is the 2016 article that I could have pointed you too, but it’s not totally clear if Experimental was a pre-Beta then, whereas it is now. I guess the text still fits, so look at it all if you like.
Duplicati discussions that have gotten down to the what-can-we-do-with-Git? level include this and this, however everyone has recently been trying to get a long-needed Beta out, and discussion will continue, however to pull it off takes a combination of a workable process, and some volunteer able to help drive.
Probably the best next step if you have an interest in any of this is to PM kenkendk, however with many volunteers around, there’s probably an additional level of discussion. As you said, it’s not just top-down, however the main contributors seem to want Duplicati to succeed (duh) and seem to work well together. One question is how much time you have, but Kenneth has little, so any support might be very valuable.