There are many decisions about Elm (the language and the development process) that I'm personally not crazy about. However, with so many asking "why are open source maintainers burning out?" I think it's a bit obnoxious for us as a community to criticize someone's chosen style for working on their free gift to us all.
The issue is that after awhile, a language should not be an individual person's gift to the world. It's a tool, after all. People and companies use and depend on it; users should be given greater freedoms or voices. It's not a piece of art to marvel at; it's something to be tugged on by many angles to create real work by people other than the language author.
In most languages, like C++, Javascript, Clojure, Elixir -- you find a single person who created the language, and then the real guts of how the industry actually uses it are the results of a large community; the original author usually isn't the sole source of best practices.
