Despite all of the positive self-talk, I don't know if they realize how important they are, or how easy it would be for them to find good help and advice if their management were transparent and everything was debated in public. That may have protected it to some extent; as a counterexample, Wikipedia has been extremely fragile due to its transparency and accessibility to everyone. With IA being driven by its creator's ideology, maybe that ideology should be formalized and set in stone as bylaws, and the torch passed to people openly debating how IA should be run, its operations, and what it should be taking on.
I don't mean they should be run by the random set of Confucian-style libertarian aphorisms that is running the credibility of Wikipedia into the ground, but Debian is a good model to follow. Or maybe do better than both?