That’s only momentary progress.

I’m sure that the fact that we have entire features that are totally untested (like, say, toolbar customization) means that for a casual contributor (like, say, me), what would otherwise be a trivial fix (like, say, allowing for drops anywhere on the customization palette rather than just inside an invisible box within it, I forget the bug number but I think it’s still assigned to me) turns from something that can be done in an evening into something that can’t be done at all. Given an existing test, I’d be happy to tweak it into testing my change, but without one, rather than having untested better behavior we will continue to have untested worse behavior until someone smarter than me writes the initial test. And I’m not naive enough to think that it’s just now, in crunch time, that nobody has time to write tests for existing features they aren’t in the middle of changing.

I guess if we don’t expect casual contributors to write tests from scratch, and we don’t expect core contributors to write tests for existing features, and we expect core contributors to give writing tests for casual contributors’ patches lowest priority, we can always just count on rewriting everything from scratch, with accompanying tests from the rewrite, to eventually give us test coverage that will allow casual contributors to contribute again