In my opinion, as a iregular forum reader and forum member since MB times, i see one problem with planeshift.
Talad wants to do too many things. I think Talad fears of losing control over the project, if its not he that does the ultimes decission making on everything.
In my opinion, Talad should delegate responsabilitys to other people, like recruiting. There is absolutely no logic to say that they are busy, so they have no time to recruit new people. Take your time, recruit one person that takes care about the recruiting part. Soon you will have a few new developers (from what ive seen there are enough people that offer their help, sure, not everybody is good enough, but im sure that many are).
From outside it looks like there is Talad, the big ruler, with his little workers, that do some work, and then wait until HE accepts it.
Ah, and while we are at it. There is one thing i think could be changed. The contributions in the art forum, why can they never go into the game? look at wesnoth. Doing the unit graphics is one bif group effort where everyone participates and helps each other. This is not the case in planeshift, its open source, yes, but the developement model is very closed i think.
But as i said, i dont realy know how the planeshift developement works internaly and i can just judge from what is written in the forum.