Wow, busy thread! Constructive with valuable ideas if I may add.
@camti, I can only give my personal opinion here, but I’d say the points you delineated, following my partial quote of your post above, are very much in line with the project governing principles and direction. (Transparency and communication, reliability, performance, growth, redundancy, security, innovation, expertise, guidance, collaboration).
I’d also go so far as saying that they have, to date, been generally implemented , albeit definitely incompletely in some areas for sure, and with lots of room for improvement. Yet all those characteristics you’ve eloquently listed are here to a not so incomplete extent. To summarize:
Transparency and communication can be seen right here on this forum, on multiple gitter rooms and github channels, along with FB for some but not all of us. Add to this the monthly reports to partners, and the weekly dev calls that anyone can attend, and the hundreds of pages of documentation.
Reliability and performance has been demonstrated by the widespread use of Ardupilot in professional, industrial and research environments. Likewise redundancy, with support for multiple IMUs and GPS, general failover mechanisms, and more recently battery multi use, to name a few examples.And security with mavlink 2 for instance, or the availability of all source code for scrutiny.
Innovation can be witnessed by Ardupilot’s history of continuous addition of new features with Ardupilot staying on top of the game. This be it, to summarize and again give just a few examples, through support of a wide variety of simulation environments (ROS gazebo, X-plane, RealFlight, plain yet rich build-in SITL, Flight gear, the most recent Morse, etc …), ESC protocols and features (soft serial, DShot, BLHeli, etc …), vehicle architectures (quadplanes, tail sitters, monocopters, helis, exotic rovers and balance bots, subs, etc …).
Finally expertise, guidance and collaboration (to be brief again) are characteristics constantly on display in this forum and other communication channels listed above, and also on display with partner communications and Ardupilot’s wide support for a uniquely large variety of hardware.
Are there holes in the above? Absolutely, and far from me the idea of giving the impression that everything is perfect with no need for improvement. It’s also why I think your post is so valuable. Yet I wanted to also tell “this opinion” of the story 
Perhaps what could be done is digging in further on those areas, and within each category identifying the larger holes, to then prioritize what the community as a whole thinks can be improved.