This is different from the ongoing maintenance of Perl. We want and need a small group to design perl6 correctly. I can't see this working any other way. The architecture will be partially decided by Larry, and seems best done by a few experienced with such things. Detailed design seems appropriate for groups of 5-10 people in each area.
Implementation is different from design, and different again from maintenance.
If we do the design, test cases, and stubbing well enough, we could have a cast of thousands doing the implementation. I honestly don't see us arguing over design. Or even over implementation. The big meat of this discussion so far seems to have been how to prevent the ongoing maintenance of Perl from being coopted. I'm thinking about a team structure for ongoing maintenance.