Again, not disagreeing necessarily - but it all boils down to your signal-to-noise ratio, i.e. people being willing to listen to you, and being willing to let you affect their work, based on what you can have to bring to the table. Not all that unreasonable, it's a simple and effective way of "filtering", i.e. what's "relevant" and what (who) has the greatest the ROI.
I am not saying that what you describe would be "better", I am just saying that it may be harder to actually implement than you realize, and that this may only become apparent once it is your own spare time that you need to allocate to different interests, priorities and contributions in general.
Quite frankly, we don't even have the manpower to process all the reasonable feedback/ideas that experienced contributors are coming up with, or just look at the issue tracker, and the growing backlog of patches/commits - you gotta need to make concessions at some point. Which isn't unlike having to pay your bills each month, so you need to make sure that your priorities match the harsh reality and the constraints it's bringing with it.
Would it be better if all reported bugs were triaged, reviewed and debugged/fixed immediately, sure - is it possible to implement that "easily" - unfortunately not ...
I once said somewhere that you may only appreciate these fine points once you are given some kind of "leadership role" in this community, no matter if that means commit access to sg/fg, fgdata, or admin/moderator privileges on the forum/wiki or some other criticial infrastructure (think issue tracker, build server, mapserver etc) - let's face it: People could hook you up with all sorts of privileges within a few seconds, and all of a sudden you'd be considered a "core developer", "fgdata committer", "wiki admin", "forum moderator" or whatever else - including all the community expectations that come with these privileges.
However, regardless of your "privileges", your own reality (spare time, professional obligations, education, family, other obligations etc) may not have changed much, whereas you would all of a sudden be considered a "key player" by most/many others.
Just look at some of the more seasoned contributors, many of whom, based on looking at the commit logs, are no longer as actively involved in core development matters as they once were, literally having taken a backseat, i.e. delegating things or maintaining infrastructure (think website) or just taking a long hiatus from FG matters - but community expectations still remain high, despite many folks being basically "inactive" these days.
And now imagine you are given the corresponding privileges to help maintain criticial infrastructure, and all sorts of people would suggest: "please get in touch with Lydiot, he's got commit access to help you review your XYZ patch" - all that while having a 40+ hrs week of work ahead of you, and a family of 4, an old dog, 2 cats ... 2 cars to pay for, 1 house ... and you are getting the picture, right
In summary, the FlightGear community is not even remotely as "closed-circle" as it may admittedly appear to bystanders, for that it is insufficiently organized honestly - i.e. many thing that happen (or don't happen) primarily happen due to inertia, temporary momentum and activity of some few folks.