I was talking to Leisa at DrupalCon about how this initiative fits in to various efforts to "stop the bleeding" on things that are obviously broken and need something done, even if they don't have the benefit of months of collecting user stories, synthesizing the pain points, exploring possible solutions, etc. She said she wanted to hear about those efforts, but not to be a gatekeeper for them moving forward. In her words: "A half-good solution is better than no solution at all". So, she suggested I opened a wiki page here to list specific changes we're planning/hoping to roll out in the nearish future, to at least keep this group informed of them (if nothing else, as more data about the existing problems).
Off the top of my head, these are the first two that come to mind:
#1036132: Provide a mechanism to flag individual comments as issue summaries
Real issue subscriptions on drupal.org
I (or others) will hopefully keep this page updated as either other changes are getting ready to go live or are actually deployed...
Feel free to edit this directly, but I'm also enabling comments on here for folks to discuss if needed.