Welcome to the community @Catboomer 
and you are spot on in those observations. On one hand we are quite happy about the growth in numbers and developer interest caused by The Muskening™. OTOH there are fears for corporate capture, upto EEE and changing cultures (Eternal September).
If you didn’t read it yet, you might like the take in Ideating organization structure for the Grassroots Fediverse (wiki) to organize in two parallel tracks, a grassroots one and a formal one. This forum is like a DoOcracy where anyone can take initiative to bring improvements.
There’s quite a bit of interest in the C2S parts of the specs these days, and - related to that - fill in the missing bits and pieces to implement solutions that with a decent level of interoperability. The extensibility mechanism of AS/AP needs to be improved / formalized, and there’s some talk about Capability Discovery and Compliance Profiles whereby servers and clients can figure out what’s supported by particular actor endpoints.
You can help by participating in the Fediverse Enhancement Proposal process. See existing FEP’s. Just yesterday a new FEP was added, proposing an extension for Valueflows. For recipes something similar might be done.