I genuinly hoped for improved tools for moderation and community safety, as well as onboarding*... 
I mean, if you want to grow, maybe we should work on user retention and making the experience a nicer one, including for others than white European dudes working in tech?
Sorry if that sounds harsh. Mastodon is great. But the priorities of the core developers seem not to align with what many of the community consider necessary.
* no, here I don't mean that mastodon.social should be the default instance. That could be replaced with randomly selected trusted instance from a pool.