Hey.

Let me start that I really appreciate all the work the encode is doing for python ecosystem, I am really grateful for that.

However, I went through 2020 and 2021 reports and there isn't really much about DRF, as it's considered feature complete and stable. Reports where DRF is mentioned:

1. https://www.encode.io/reports/april-2020
2. https://www.encode.io/reports/march-2020
3. https://www.encode.io/reports/february-2020
4. https://www.encode.io/reports/december-2020
5. https://www.encode.io/reports/october-2020
6. https://www.encode.io/reports/march-2021

the main take-away is that even if it's the main source of income for Encode, it's not where the most focus goes. From my perspective, this is the image I get (and it might be unfair!):

1. significantly slowing down on merging PRs, most of them actually not being about any new features or bug fixes/reports. E.g. looking at the commit log since last March, there seems to be only one commit that actually adds dev/user-facing feature (and it's still fairly minor). Others feel much more like fixing typos and links here and there, improving test, or bumping deps. Even though there are clearly many reported bugs or feature requests on the issue tracker (and clearly e.g. OpenAPI schema generation has a plenty space for improvement).
2. https://fund.django-rest-framework.org/topics/funding/ sections drastically outdated (version 3.6 is ~4 years old, Tom surely not working on this full-time, definitely not 80-90 closed issues/PRs / month, this section doesn't seem to be worked on at all)
3. 141 unmerged PRs, many without even a single reaction of maintainers for months or weeks
4. some of the issues not addressed at all as well (I know - you have a discussion-first workflow, but still, if you want to make the project better, I think going through those 120 issues would IMO still improve it significantly and could be IMO categorized/split into some work-to-be-done quite easily)
5. the long-term future of the project is looking a bit grim - there are no new maintainers/adopters apparently, and encode doesn't focus on this. Because of the points above, it probably doesn't attract that many contributors (maybe also because there is some bias of type "They get paid for it, so they do it?")

I like DRF, used that in many projects, but I am starting to worry. This is not looking good.