> If someone were really motivated to solve problems in that area, do you really feel they would be given the time to explore it?

Yes. Beware though - some parts of the issue might be more political rather than technical (eg. Team A wants user accounts banned for violating XYZ policy, while Team B has other data which shows those user accounts aren't bad, but can't share the data with Team A because that violates privacy terms).

For issues that are purely technical (for example, the automated spam detection system has a false positive on an obscure but legit library), any Google employee can send a pull request to fix it, and in general your pull request will be accepted and deployed.