Oh absolutely. I have given up on engaging with him, it is pointless (I am jdhoek on GitHub, and have contributed various commits to Carto in the past).

While I can understand that being a maintainer for a project like Carto can be taxing due to the high amount of feature requests which are often not suitable for the general purpose map, lack usage, or are otherwise unclear in their definition, I find that the way Carto has been maintained for the past few years has been harmful to the OpenStreetMap project in general.

I think Christopher Hormann (imagico), despite his contributions in the past, is actively harming OpenStreetMap with his maintainership and (lack of) actions. Although to be fair the OpenStreetMap Foundation shares some of the blame here by shrugging 'not our problem' when the state of the default layer on openstreetmap.org is, repeatedly, pointed out, and letting this state of affairs persist. The typical response of 'Oh, OpenStreetMap is a do-ocracy, haha, if you want to change this, just create your own layer!' does not befit a project which has achieved so much as OpenStreetMap.

I know nothing about the specific issues here, but as you mentioned do-ocracy: Would it be viable to fork carto and merge the good stuff that has been originally rejected, then asking openstreetmap.org to change their map renderer to the fork? If it's objectively better and has broad community support, that should be in the best interest of OSM.

(once again: very little knowledge of OSM, so maybe that's overly naive)

Absolutely doable but not really worthwhile right now. Vector tiles open up many more possibilities for custom cartography and I have every confidence Paul’s work will live up to this promise. osm-carto is essentially a dead end cartographically and technically.

Possibly, but in reality, not really. Without buy-in from the OSMF (the foundation) this could result in a lot of effort and time ultimately wasted due to overlapping roles of people concerned in the Operations Working Group.

Most people with the knowledge and capacity to do this have spent their energy on other initiatives not hosted directly on openstreetmap.org instead (like OpenStreetMap Americana destined for the US chapter's OSM website), or contributing to OsmAnd or OrganicMaps.

OSMF chairperson here. I share your frustration. This is us doing something about it!