When I get back home from here in Australia I plan on trying to lead-by-example by starting to tackle the huge backlog of reported bugs, but I'd like to know if anybody has seen other open source projects successfully get people to fix bugs instead of constantly adding features. Would policies like "that spiffy new feature you want won't be considered until you've helped close some open bugs" be effective (or would it just encourage people to create shill accounts to open trivial-to-fix issues)?

If this was your run-of-the-mill open source project I would be much more lackadaisical about letting in new features... but when people lose money because bugs slip through (and several people HAVE recently lost money because of bugs slipping through) we obviously have a pretty big problem just making sure that the features we have now work properly.

(Thanks VERY much to those of you have HAVE been helping test and have been submitting bug fixes; I don't mean to imply that everybody has been feature-happy, just that it seems like a lot of potential bitcoin contributors start out by submitting a nifty new feature that sure would be nice to have if we weren't so busy trying to make sure the features we already have work properly all the time).