My guess is because Lemmy is written in Rust, so comparatively less people can contribute

Rust vs. python might be part of it since python is basically designed to be quick to write. However, the lemmy devs, to their credit, are extremely thorough. They make sure that any feature they implement is fully available in the UI, the API, and has tests written for it.

For piefed, we test stuff as we work on it...but there isn't a formal test suite or anything like that. And, as evidenced by this post, many new features only show up in the web ui and may get added to the api later, time/effort depending. This is something we have been trying to get better at, adding features to both the web ui and the api at the same time, but it is more work so it goes slower.

Dunno why, i don't think it is worth our time to understand why nor pinning it to polical opinion is a good idea. And Lemmy devs are inspired by those ideas :)

Let's just enjoy its news features. Do you wanna do a poll on the best linux desktop ? Or Wayland vs Xorg ? :)

There is a lot of backend work happening for Lemmy 1.0, but due to tech-debt and some NIH issues, it does indeed develop at a slower pace right now.

They've been gearing up for the 1.0 release for a while. Big changes have been happening they just haven't released yet.

Polls are an open issue that the devs have said they'd love a PR for.