Manishearth's answer is (basically) the short version. Our core development team is ~7 people strong, and our design team is literally a single person. There's lots of projects, network-wide, that vie equally for their attention. Eight people handle all user feature requests.
The longer answer is a bit more complicated. Since I'm talking to people involved in the SDLC, I'm a little astonished that you're not all a bit more sympathetic. After all, the network is 90+ sites, and we serve double-digit millions of users, and getting the project right from step one takes time and person-power we don't really have right now.
The bugs and errors you point out, while important, aren't going to get top priority because there are other problems that affect the entire network that may require immediate attention (e.g. a site blackout) or are concentrating developer resources right now (e.g. the /review queue, or our localization efforts).
What explains such passiveness? Is it because Joel Spolsky and his team lost interest in Programmers.SE, like he repeatedly explains in his podcasts?
Okay, let me clear about something: there is more to the Stack Exchange team than Joel or the dev team. For one, there's the team I'm on: your (hopefully beloved) Community Managers. And, in fact, we even hired on one of your moderators based on her work here. So, no, the company doesn't hate Programmers. Denying your community's complicated history would be foolish and short-sighted, and a great number of really excellent lessons were learned over the course of the last two years.
The "passiveness" you're referring to is entirely perceived; it's a symptom of the real issue, which is that our development team is overextended. Their time is an extremely precious, scarce resource. Not to put too fine a point on it: they're only human.
Who is (or is there somebody) in charge of implementing new features and fixing bugs on Programmers.SE?
Design bugs are usually handled by our always-wonderful, one-man design team of Jin Yang. Jin is literally one single person handling all site design issues across the network. Jin also does the design for our marketing initiatives, some of our advertising, helps us make fliers and small promo items, puts together top user swag and a whole host of things.
Is there a better place than Meta to ask for new features and to report bugs?
No. Meta is exactly the correct place for you to be reporting these.
Look, I'm sympathetic. I really, really am. I've been working on making features happen on some of our other sites for months now. The toughest is knowing that doing a fun, exciting event would basically "cost" us a feature for a site. All decisions regarding dev allocations are made with great care and after a lot of deliberation. We don't just assign development time to things willy-nilly because we cannot do so. It's literally a thing we can't do.
If you're dissatisfied with our ability to meet our users' needs (and it does sound like you are) then you're in luck. Right now, we're hiring for a bunch of positions, including developers. If you know someone who could/should be working for us, who loves our sites (yes, even Programmers!) and is a talented developer who is looking for a new challenge, tell them to apply!
Otherwise, for the mean time, I can only advise you sit tight and be patient. It's all on The ListTM and I'm confident we'll get to it. It just might take some time.
