Thoughts on the addition of Core maintainers
Historically I'm not aware of any long term Core contributor putting themselves forward as a potential Core maintainer and being rejected/blocked. We recently saw that with Vasil Dimov where two maintainers (fanquake, glozow) blocked him from becoming a maintainer for 5 months with Vasil eventually closing the related pull request.
When it is a contributor who has clearly demonstrated value and expertise opening pull requests and reviewing pull requests over a number of years (in Vasil's case in a part of the codebase that existing maintainers aren't familiar with covering Tor, I2P, alternative networks etc) there really should be a solid rationale for blocking that long term contributor from becoming a maintainer. I was always under the impression that the maintainer role was essentially janitorial. Of course occasionally there are disagreements between long term contributors and these views have to be weighed