Notice that I'm not in any way discouraging any involvement from users, the association or anything, I've rather been encouraging it.
We've laid our vision of how the upcoming release should be, while Mandriva didn't allow us to have the trademark or logo, we do get to keep the rest of the brand with things like "The Friendly Face of Linux", cute penguins etc. that we really wanna carry on as it's part of our identity and brand recognition, which is one of the few things we have left in all of this.
So while no artwork for the distribution has been produced or coordinated by the association itself, and they're way late, unskilled etc. to even think of starting to put together something (and we don't want something as silly as Mageia did for their second release, where everyone voted on various community contributions without any idea about how it should be, and not only did they end up with boring artwork, they ended up with artwork ripped off from someone else), while we've had our ideas in place and decided on since we first got the technical specs etc. in place for the upcoming release.
So we do value the input from our users, and we do encourage and greatfully accept their contributions, but not only do we find it unacceptable for this association to fully govern and take complete control of the distribution like they're trying to go about, they're even trying to do so for things planned and worked on by us for since long time ago, for things they've yet to produce or even plan anything for.
If they wanna be involved with this, and especially for this release, they need to properly involved with those of us who are already doing the actual work with well established experience, insight and expertize, not trying to make decissions on things for and without us.
For next release they may get to be more fully involved from the start and participate discussions and making decissions, provided that they contribute anything to it, but even this has to be done in a proper manner, through proper channels and following established etiquette for development.
@viking60: My greatest concern is certainly the quality of the distribution as well, which is simply why I trust myself and existing contributors worked together with rather than turning everything over to someone who hasn't bothered to try work together with us (despite of repeatedly being urged to do so), nor has any relevant experience, anything produced nor even started on discussions of any plans for it either.
@dedanna1029: I won't jump the ship as it would mean abandoning everything we've built and legacy to carry, while a fork also would imply a lot more work (without any delayed pay at all even;) as I'm not working *alone*. We do have several contributors who fortunately shares the tremendous amount of work on updating and maintaing software packages in the distribution, but most tend to prefer focusing on those things of most interest to themself (which there's nothing wrong with at all) and there's usually few who actually goes on to take care of and follows through on any responsibilities beyond this, which are the things I've been left working pretty much all alone on, which is quite frustrating and challenging as these are the more demanding tasks that it would've been a delight of not having to carry the burden of being the single point of failure. A technical committe appointed by the council in the naive belief of that everyone in that group will be taking an equal amount of collective responsibility in a democratic fashion is pretty out of touch with reality, especially considering all of our actual experience so far speaks strongly against this.
We'll be having an IRC meeting in 30 minutes for the cooker community to discuss the matters btw., so there should hopefully be some further interesting development later today..
)
Music plays Java works Flash... 
However I am not depending on it so I can continue testing....