I agree with what Niek said, mostly in how if you want things to change you have to lead by example. The act of proposing an idea for a super ultimate engine that ends all the problems here does not help unless someone or some group of users wants to put the work in, and it does not make one wiser to put forward something without it having some capability of achieving practical reality. That last part probably sounds harsh and I don't mean it against anyone personally but there is this culture of saying the current method is failing because it isn't some awesome ideal method.
As for fan game development, it comes down to being able to do what has already been done well enough and then to try and add something new which fits in well with what was done well enough. I understand your point about getting into things beyond coding what has been done and I agree. The GM Minish Cap Engine is trying to do that so other stuff can be focused on. Additionally, the board restructuring which I recently put forward is being done so in order to get the programming boards to be better. I had to sift through topic after topic dealing with the same old !@#$% over and over again. It is stupid to have a forum where knowledge accumulated over its history is discarded and forgotten about.
I haven't collected any statistics about it or anything but a lot of topics tend to focus on Legend of Zelda Link movement, pushing, pause menu, registration menu, online multiplayer, pushing, ice movement, view centering, rolling, etc. It starts around 2006-2007 and still in 2010-2011 the topics are about the same. Part of the problem is that when we had the Discussion board being for all programming topics and Engines be just for engines, there was less need or inclination to keep lists of what had been done well enough. The Discussion board also had a lot of topics that must have been dumped there when old boards were closed. The coolest things I found were Desgardes various Minish Cap stuff, Chesu's Kokiri people building sheet, and I think one topic had an aab ripped Minish Cap Red Darknut.
About helping out and stuff, I have about 10 more pages of Discussion to go through and make sure are properly sorted before I merge Concepts with Discussion. After that Zelda Coding and Other Coding will have to be gone through and salvaged for what has been made if that is still possible. This goes beyond just seeing what engines are there but also deals with going through request topics to see what was answered, and like for example if there are 24 topics on hookshot stuff for us to logically group those together in some way. There were more than a few topics which have poor explanatory titles too.
Also though, the GM Minish Cap Engine, one of the best ways to help beyond trying to contribute something to it is to actually give feedback about the features that are put forward. It is a little disheartening to put work into something and then get hardly no feedback about it. Well it is even more disheartening to see that it gets a few downloads from either those who aren't giving feedback about it, or worse from guests who are just reaping its benefits and are giving nothing back to the community. I am really considering a reorientation of the site's purpose to be a resource and project database with the forum unable to be see by all guests trying to view it.