No, it was born because of the structure of SodiPodi. Lauris was effectively the gatekeeper and others did not have commit access. He wasn't accepting patches he didn't want to, so a handful of our founders decided to fork and have a much more open approach. As it stands, if you have two patches accepted with the project (Inkscape) and want it, you can have commit access.
One reason we're not at 1.0 yet is because the original 1.0 goal was to have complete SVG 1.1 support in, which will likely never happen. We changed the version numbering scheme to better reflect where we think we are.
The reason why we're still not there right now is because there are some essential things like canvas coordinates, fixed "flow text" support (so it works in browsers), etc that we need to rectify first before we're comfortable with 1.0.
Unfortunately there is a registration requirement. I will check with JonCruz to see if freenode ever gave him admin status and if he'd be kind enough to remove that restriction (that is if it's on our end with the channel and not the server's).
Just so you know, there are tutorials in Inkscape's Help menu as well to help with a lot of the basics. If you ever run into any issues, feel free to pop in our IRC channel and ask away. Also, if you tweet anything containing "inkscape" in the message, chances are one of us will respond in less than 12 hours (most of the time).
For the record, since you're a "dev and not an artist", we have people in our community that will contribute art in exchange for your time if you were to contribute code to Inkscape.
If there's no opt-out, that's a different story.