Evan wants to design Elm as thoughtfully as he can, and has been deliberately resisting community evolution. Eventually it will get too big and too useful, and he'll lose the ability to make big breaking changes easily. So he's tried to maintain control of the direction of the language and community during these early years while he figures it out. He's trying to reduce the feedback loop and come up with the best possible base before it starts to scale.
It feels like it's stabilizing. I expect that over the next year or so this will change dramatically and it will become much more community driven.