@smallcircles🫧 socialcoding.. I guess I've been on the look-out for discussion by the people making things here. Owncast, Bonfire, RFF, Indie Beat Radio and TV, Fireside Fedi, Fedilab, dansup's many projects, and folk involved in AP more directly. They've all been talking about what they do and plan, and have listened or given a voice to people asking and answering questions about how the Fedi grows. There does seem to be plenty of social discussion out there.
You are certainly not wrong. And I apologize, as it is not immediately clear that my post above is against the backdrop of 2 weeks of microblogging addressing a whole range of paint points and inhibitors to a fedi that evolves to be the future of social networking. Microblogging is too fragmentary and 'context-lossy', but unfortunately the primary comms channel for the dev community.
The gist and big issue is that the current fediverse is app-centric in nature, and accepted a work method that will further that app-centricness by introducing ever more protocol decay and tech debt. The examples you gave above are app talk, turn to features, howto federate feature, tech talk, get mired in impl details. And importantly: do not catch up with standards. That is up to some poor volunteers, who see that things are going side-ways.
There are 2 fediverse forks: the promised one in the AP specs, and the one we have. There's no shared vision, and tons of misconception to deal with.
If you have a fediverse account, you can quote this note from your own instance. Search https://social.coop/users/smallcircles/statuses/116176348564438959 on your instance and quote it. (Note that quoting is not supported in Mastodon.)