Hi Britton,
I think your suggestion is great. Like Nathan, I agree that a ytep should potentially be a good place to codify the procedures associated with pull requests, releases, making contributions, etc. Having them written down is key, so there aren't any misunderstandings about what one developer thinks is the standard versus another developer.
As far as a governing body, I guess I don't know what you suggest. You mean like 3-5 people who "direct" the overall direction of the code and features to tackle in the not-so-distant future and deal with some of the other issues you raise like conflict resolution, stability, and credit? I could potentially be in favor of this depending on the details.
I do think that it would be great to have a mechanism in place to recognize major contributors to the yt effort, although I'm not sure what that is. Previously we had some sort of informal list of core developers, but that's basically just self-selected and doesn't really make it outside of this email list (if it even makes it here). The time and effort that many of us put into yt is substantial and there isn't much official recognition of this, so I'm definitely in favor of creating something to ameliorate this problem, but I don't really know what.
So in summary, I'm in favor of moving this discussion forward, but I don't have any mind-bending suggestions at this point.
Cameron