Jerduino:
Perhaps you can point me to a page that would instruct me about the life of the project,
"Life of the project"? I don't understand what you want.
decision process,
As far as I know, David Mellis makes all software decisions for Arduino / AVR. A good starting point is the Developers List...
http://arduino.cc/mailman/listinfo/developers_arduino.cc
patch submission, etc.
A patch starts life here...
http://code.google.com/p/arduino/issues/list
To maximize the chances of it being including, fork then create a pull request here..
You can always create your own library independent of the Arduino folks.