I wonder if maybe the nearest step towards "better bug tracker" is a more readily referenceable mail archive.
Clearly, one of our "frictions" is searching for relevant messages, so improved mail archive == lowered friction, no? There's a very particular use case; people keep rueing that indexes get cut off on a monthly basis. That's doubtless not the only pain, but it keeps getting mentioned, so solving it seems valuable. Having a correlation between commits, commitfest entries, and associated email seems like another valuable addition. Perhaps there are more... I'm not yet poking at anything that would suggest "email database", either. A lot of the analysis would be more network-oriented; putting more of a Prolog hat on, not so much tabular / relational ...
