Did you try to tell gilles, eric, and some other committers about your concerns in private, before posting on a public mailing list and then submitting your own post to HN?

No, he didn't.

As much as he'd like to make it like we don't fix bugs, our public bug tracker is one click away and shows that out of the 25 open issues and the 493 closed issues, none mentions even remotely a pending crash that he is experiencing. He does have some feature requests and bugs though, with many handled already, so it seems that he does knows where to find it when he needs to.

As for his concerns, yes he did tell me, he sent me 16 mails yesterday, including the one with the trace. Unfortunately, he sent it past midnight, at about the same time he made it public because he just couldn't wait until morning to disclose.

It's a conversation that's been going on for a long time now over various channels but has/had mostly stagnated into a disappointing lull of complacency. The Quayls results were a big wake up to that, and my own finding yesterday was the final straw: fresh ideas and voices on how to carry the project toward maturation are quite necessary, as well as smart folks like yourself becoming interested in reviewing the source code.