My thoughts:
From a high-level overview perspective, it seems as though the “pitch” phase is for the beginning of a proposal, where the core ideas are promulgated to see if there is community support. Similarly, the “review” phase comes at the end of the process, when the community and core team decide whether to adopt a fully fledged and implemented proposal into the language.
But there is not currently any structure for the middle of the process—how to get from pitch to review.
The middle part is where counterproposals ought to arise, where all the details should be hammered out, and the implementation perfected. I will call this the “development” phase. And today, that takes place privately, by the proposal author(s), out of sight of the community.
In another thread, @John_McCall recently wrote:
This suggests that the pitch phase is the place for developing the proposal. But it also seems to indicate that serious disagreements and counterproposals shouldn’t be hashed out in the pitch thread, but instead should wait for review.
Perhaps an adjustment to the process is needed.
One idea would be to build on the “preview package” idea, to make proposals available for general use prior to their review. A standard like, “the core team is not fundamentally opposed to this proposal in principle, and an implementation has been written”, should be sufficient.
Then people could try out proposals, give feedback to the authors based on direct experience, write counterproposals and so forth all in the “development” phase, rather than attempting to cram everything into the pitch and review. In other words, to recognize and strengthen the middle section of the process, instead of just the beginning and end.