"The sad part about this is that people who didn't get "their thing" into core is going to use this as self-validation, even if the idea really was bad to begin with."
Most of what is mentioned in this talk are not that much of an improvement, non-issues, or all around horrible ideas.
The fact is though there are major issues with the framework (not mentioned in this talk), and much of it is due to how things are being managed at the moment rather than a lack of ready, willing, and able contributors.
There already is a fork (django-experimental), though interest seems to be limited at the moment.
There has been limited work on it. Essentially I just fixed the demented logging system... though I will probably fix the demented templating system, and ORM in due time.