@phibermon

I see us two have a different opinion of effective learning process.
I'm guessing you are more oriented toward traditional learning where you are simply told what to do and what it "best" approach to do it.
Well I'm more oriented toward exploratory learning approach where you tell people which approaches doesn't work at all and also show them as many possible approaches that work and let them decide which approach is "best".

You might have noticed that I always write best in double quotes. I do this because in programming there is no best solution that would fit everyone. Best solution actually depends on many things like compatibility with existing code and coding style, current programming level of individual etc.

I'm willing to bet that if us two get into discussion of how base code should look we will both have different ideas for it. Why? Because each of us is probably thinking about different scenarios to use that base code in not to mention that each of us probably have its own preferred coding style.
Only by working together could we design base code that would be most suitable for both mine and yours usage scenarios. Same goes if we want to make this base code to me best suitable for everyone.
That is why I feel we should allow everyone interested (even those with no prior experience of game engine development) to also be part of the base code development even thou they might be just watching it being built.