a SHOULD is always trumped in RFCs by a MUST. The fact that hosts SHOULD do something means that they might not and I just wanted reassurance that, in reality, the SHOULD is a bit more widely adopted than its definition implies.

When an IETF RFC uses the keyword “MUST” it means business

I'd like to go with an RFC-based governance model (similar to Rust, Ember or Swift) that looks something like this: new features go through a public RFC that describes the motivation for the change, a detailed implementation description, a description on how to document or teach the change (for kpm, that would roughly be focused around how it affected the usual workflows), any drawbacks or alternatives, and any open questions that should be addressed before merging. the change is discussed until all of the relevant arguments have been debated and the arguments are starting to become repetitive (they "reach a steady state") the RFC goes into "final comment period", allowing people who weren't paying close attention to every proposal to have a chance to weigh in with new arguments. assuming no new arguments are presented, the RFC is merged by consensus of the core team and the feature is implemented. All changes, regardless of their source, go through this process, giving active community members who aren't on the core team an opportunity to participate directly in the future direction of the project. (both because of proposals they submit and ones from the core team that they contribute to)

The RFC repo (where the reaction was strongly positive) is the place for discussion about what features to add; the decision has been made.

Yarn also has an RFC process which may offer a better discussion platform compared to this GitHub issue.

Many changes, including bug fixes and documentation improvements can be implemented and reviewed via the normal GitHub pull request workflow. Some changes though are "substantial", and we ask that these be put through a bit of a design process and produce a consensus among the Yarn core team. The "RFC" (request for comments) process is intended to provide a consistent and controlled path for new features to enter the project.