I'd say this relates to complete lack of processes. Sometimes people just have to sit down and decide how things are supposed to flow, and how to overcome difficulties, and have a simple but clever plan. Apparently there's no such plan in Android. I think this is because it has gotten to much visibility in quite a short time. Not sure. What I do know is we (the gta-02 core people, OpenMoko GTA02 owners) never got android working well on our platform. Also most patches I believe never made to the main line (Koolu did most of the "port", I have not followed developments on that so I might be biased here).
They however managed to design and implement repo/gerrit. I see those projects as nice, but again not quite ready for production use.