Raymond Hettinger writes:
[Terry Jones]
The obvious suggestion is to anonymize the review process.
FWIW, that was tried and the people complained about that too.
Who would you rather hear speak about the future of Python, Guido and someone else? About the state of Twisted, from someone on that team or from a user who read the Twisted book? About UnladedSwallow or AppEngine, someone on Google's team or someone who has played around with it for a while?
That's what invited talks are for. Guido van Rossum or Alex Martelli, you invite them to give a keynote. But you can also salt the regular sessions with "invited" speakers. There's nothing that says that people can't suggest themselves for invitations.
Surely, the review process has room for improvements and better balance but anonymizing is a step too far IMO.
Anonymizing is the only way to get a reasonable balance between the very short-term view you are presenting, and the long-term view of encouraging new participants with good ideas and discouraging/warning old-timers whose ideas and views have gone stale, or even started to stink. Good proposals have a fairly high correlation with good talks; although you can't expect to win them all. You don't have to anonymize all the sessions/talks, either, but probably at least half should be refereed blind.