I started typing a reply to this last night but fell asleep as it was 5am… José has covered everything but I just wanted to add that we’ve witnessed somewhat the opposite to Sean here on the forum and since it’s been raised, what we are trying to do to help José and Chris as the community grows.
With regards to community involvement, José has consistently posted in the elixir-news section with lots of threads seeking feedback (many more in his post above). Chris has done the same in the Phoenix Forum and quite often discussions that have taken place have led to quite fundamental changes or even minor (but helpful nonetheless) tweaks.
In fact many a time I have heard people mention that it’s a huge plus having the core team active in the community - which is in contrast to other languges such as Ruby where the majority of the core team do not speak English.
Having said that, I completely appreciate that as a community grows it does indeed become more challenging to get everyone involved. Again José has highlighted many reasons why that might be (and the fact that there’s more people to get stuff done is a great problem to have) but I think it’s also worth adding that when it comes to discussing important decisions - as a community grows it becomes significantly more time consuming reviewing (and sometimes responding to) everything everyone says, particularly when you’re discussing things with people of different backgrounds and levels of understanding or when discussions diverge. Just as an example, if you look at José’s last few posts in this thread these must have taken at least an hour or two of his time.
There are tools and strategies we have and can put in place (such as post likes) that can help. By also putting the onus on to people to do their best to be constructive and demonstrate their pov as effectively as they can (so the good ideas attract lots of likes, and the not so good ideas can be openly challenged) it somewhat alleviates some of the pressure from the core team as they can quickly see which ideas are gaining traction, and hopefully someone has already addressed issues that might otherwise require a response from them (as might have happened in this thread had I not fallen asleep 
)
I’m acutely aware of the burden a growing community can have on the core team/s and part of the goal of this forum is to help and support them, José and Chris as the community grows in a way that eases as much of that burden as we can while still remaining open and receptive to new ideas while moving the conversation forward 
It can be a tricky path but I think we’ve done a good job so far but I’ll let everyone else be the judge of that 
The only other thing I wanted to comment on, is that again from my perspective, I sense a huge sense of community - at least here on the forum. I often get messages from members saying how much they love being part of this community and how it is one of the best communities they’ve ever been a part of 
