Instead of just putting it out there and letting it either succeed or fail based on the merits, there is a lot of bureaucracy around consensus building. Sadly it's just the way things are with a community/organization as large and as socialistic as Wikimedia has become.
I can relate to that. We can hardly change the social structure, but we can change the technical side. This is why I made Convenient Discussions, which contributed to speeding up processes in the communities where it was used. No more pain of meticulously editing wikitext to participate in discussions. Wikipedia has "wiki" in its name meaning "fast" in Hawaiian.