One problem those of us who've worked with volunteer-based organizations quite a bit tend to find is that more low-level volunteers take up more time to organize and supervise. Someone has to do that supervision and organization, and it usually ends up being one of the people who was doing a large portion of the work. So by taking in too many volunteers too quickly, you actually lose productive time from your existing volunteers. It's often better to take in a few volunteers at a time and get them up to speed so they can work with little supervision, even though that is often frustrating. I can't say that's currently a concern for PM, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if it was. It's quite a common issue.
One thing you might want to do is check the screen names of monks who make comments in PMD threads against the lists of gods, pmdev, and the other cabals. They comment under their regular individual monknames, but their opinions often reflect their positions as members of those groups. I know Corion, jdporter, and tye comment on feature requests quite often from the top of my head. I'm sure others do, too. It could be that you're frustrated in part because you're just not recognizing the official weight of some of the comments because they don't come from a formal office worded as official announcements.
If you're really excited to help, you might want to volunteer yourself. Perhaps you could start with something supporting PM from the outside rather than trying to jump into site development right away. Lots of monks have code that track stats, is suitable to place in the Free Nodelet, or that does something equally interesting with the XML feeds. I think it's understandable that some time invested in PM as a user and such are a basis for admission to some of the groups responsible for running the site, but that doesn't keep anyone from giving back through other means.
I'm glad to see you're so enthusiastic about PM. It really is a great site. I recently went over the eight year mark here, and I'm still sometimes learning new things not just about Perl and how the other monks think about Perl (which is often just as fascinating). I'm also still learning things about PerlMonks itself. tye taught me something useful yesterday about the site in the CB in fact. He informed me that the [SoPW] (SoPW) link goes to a node that links to Seekers of Perl Wisdom and Posting on PerlMonks and explains SoPW, and even tells people that the new question form is at the bottom. I was previously unaware of that two year old node that's very handy for mentioning in the CB when new monks ask where to ask a question.