Perhaps you should listen to the core developers who started this debate, when they explain what's burning them out? For better or worse, architectural decisions in Drupal's past have resulted in very large workload for a relatively small number of developers, and great pressure from others in the community to "Keep the system running" in the face of numerous feature requests and so on.
There's a difference between "Let's turn Drupal into an architectural masterpiece" and "Let's refactor some of this stuff to make it more manageable." Drupal has long had a culture that devalues planning and deliberation while glorifying the "firehose of code." Attempts to iron out the best path for a complex change can only go on for a few days before they're shut down with cries of "Talk is silver, code is gold!"
Obviously, the other extreme -- endless unresolved attempts to come up with the "perfect master plan" -- is just as unproductive. But there's a healthy middle ground that needs to be maintained for a project of this size to avoid crumpling under its own weight.
