From my discussion with some beehaw admins and sublinks devs, a problem is they they feel like their code contributions will not even be accepted for lack of shared goals. For example showing voting totals.
I keep saying that the most elegant solution here is to develop a plugin framework, to allow admins to customize their instance experience even when it diverges from the lemmy dev vision. If it's made software agnostic it would allow people like me scratch our own itches. Ironic I know but it's for this reason I think this should be one of the main priorities, as it will unleash a lot more Foss power on the project. It's a big reason why projects like WordPress and godot are having great success