I’m perfectly OK with that core dev team can make decision without public discussion. They deserved that power because they made cool thing at first. You and me, didn’t.
You and me also have power because we are user of Discourse and most software are meaningless without user. But these power are not in same level. We cannot taking them down. If you make cool thing, you will have that power. Please respect each other.
If someone have trouble with new change, of course they can speak about it at here. Look around this meta forum. Dev team’s posts and topics are everywhere. I have couple of Discourse powered forum in my bookmarks. They’re also popped there. The point is, they are actually listening from community very hard. If someone ask me “How it looks like become successful open source development?”, I would tell “meta.discourse.org”.
You needs more well-formed changelog, announcement or design document? Feel free ask about it and persuade us why we need it. But please don’t say “Discourse have problem with their process”. You have problem with some specific thing in your case, not Discourse development process.