Basically, an initial patch went in, we opened followup issues for cleanup, the followup issues never got followed up, so what's in HEAD is a bit of a mess. — catch, in a recent issue comment
This happens far too often. I'm not linking to the specific issue in the Drupal 7 queue because I don't want to point fingers; this suffices to exemplify my point.
I've been mulling this idea since Paris, trying to figure out the best way to present it.
But basically:
We want a smaller, slimmer, efficient core.
But we also want Drupal to, like, be useful.
We want contrib, at least the high-use end of contrib, to be smoother, more organized, released on time with core.
It's been suggested we have a contrib maintainer, who would have the unenviable task of managing a huge kaboodle.