In reply to Zachary Skaggs.

The issue is that the majority of the core commits are from Automattic employees

Yeah, no :-) https://wptavern.com/sixty-three-percent-of-wordpress-core-committers-are-not-employed-by-automattic

That said, I don't work for Automattic and I'm a member of the meta team that works on .org projects. Personally, I'm not really a fan either of the preferential treatment bbPress and BuddyPress get on .org. I can see it with bbPress because we actively dogfood it for the forums, but BuddyPress? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

They each have their own forums, their own Trac instances on .org, and special links to said forums from their plugin pages as previously mentioned. I've seen bbPress and BuddyPress referenced as "WordPress.org properties" before as the justification for why they get special treatment, so I guess the question is, "which are they? WordPress.org properties or Automattic properties?"