In my professional experience I've met architects that don't code, or even remember how. Very sad.

Even worse, in my experience I've yet to meet an architect who does know how to code.

I agree from my experience, especially with open source, that you need a person (or rarely, a junta) applying architecture.

But if that person isn't _also_ one of the coders, getting their hands dirty, their architecture will be no good.

Recently someone linked on HN to a study of succesful open source projects, that found that even the most successful ones only had few -- or often one -- person making most of the commits.

My interpretation of those findings is that it's representing this state of affairs. Although I think there's probably a way to preserve the benefits of a strong hand on architecture without having that person making all/most of the commits -- but they've got to be making some of them, to ground their plans.

Yes, I hinted at that. The architect should also code on the same project. Or at least read the code of that project.

> This will result in an inconsistent mess

It will not, when developers have a habit of sitting together and talking thru the architecture they're going to implement.

This, and readiness to throw bad parts away and only let passable ones live.