Can we improve upon our methods of bringing together community members with similar contribution ideas?

One of the magical pillars of FOSS is that it makes progress because people have a shared interest in seeing it progress. Unfortunately, just looking at the handbook page on how to contribute, I don't even see a mention of groups.drupal.org where you can post your idea for development in a proper group or a mention of feature requests on project pages. I think we need at least make it obvious how people with resources (money, time, whatever), whether they are developers or nondev types, the current way of contributing to projects with similar goals.

What I'm really asking is, discounting the fact our system is not obvious, can we develop a system that serves us better? Does anyone know of good examples? Does anyone have any ideas of what this system might look like?

I'm not familiar with the current state of the d.o redesign, I'm sure it addresses some of these issues. Should we really wait for the d.o redesign?