Now that I've had some time to think about this issue after having been out of town, I wanted to add some things to the discussion, since I think this is a really important topic.
First, about the bug fixing issue that Goober brought up early in the thread, I think the best way to remedy it is to create a culture in SCP where it's expected that the obligation to fix bugs comes with the privilege of being able to submit/commit patches for new features, with the understanding that some bugs require substantially more work to fix than others and that should be taken into account when considering how much bug fixing qualifies as "enough." Furthermore, I'd think it's appropriate that the more features a coder wants to add, taking into account the total complexity that those features would add, the more work they should be expected to put into bug fixing/refactoring.
Second, requests that are targeted to benefit just one mod, with no clear application to other mods in progress or reasonably plausible scenarios for future mods, are likely to be a hard sell, not just for coder time spent on implementing them but also for getting patches for them accepted, for the reasons Goober mentioned earlier in this thread. That's not to say that they shouldn't be considered, though, simply that they're a hard sell. This comment isn't targeted towards WoD or any other specific mod or specific feature but is just meant as a general statement.
To qualify my response and perhaps even discount it a bit, I don't work on FSO, so I have a bit of an outsider perspective. That said, for the hundreds of hours that I have put into wxLauncher so far, I have added just two features, one that's substantial but not that large, and one that's very small. Nearly all of the time I've spent on it has gone into OS X support, UI revisions, or bug fixing/refactoring. Future work on wxL for at least the foreseeable future will go into more bug fixing/refactoring or into adding features that are obviously useful (like a refresh button for the list of mods) or absolutely necessary (like support for the new sound code).
Anticipating some probable replies given the first page of this thread, I'll say that my opinion is just that -- my opinion! Other SCP members may feel differently, and it's likely that at least some of those who do will post here.