I have had two bugs in the last few months (MDL-31519 and MDL-35111) where I submitted a valuable bug fix for integration, and it got pushed back with a comment like

We are not sure if this is the right general approach, there needs to a general policy on how to do this sort of thing, and then we will know whether to accept or reject your patch. In the mean time, we are going to take it out of integration.

The problem is, nothing happens after that.

Who should make those policy decision? What is the process for doing so?

It is not quite the same as coding style, where we have the policy "Create a MDLSITE, then the integrators decide".

Meanwhile, those patches I made which fix a problem that is causing pain to Moodle users just sit there bit-rotting.