I think there is yet no reason of being afraid that sugar daddies will turn our IDE in something totally different than an IDE.
I also think Gunnar pointed out some important key points: Every committer has to earn his wings by contributing to the project in a meaningful way. Even a developer financed by a member of the WG still has to get acceptance of the team he is contributing to. I don't see any difference of a committer coming from, say, Redhat contributing to P2, Platform or JDT and a developer payed by a member of the WG.
Generally, we should not think of members of the potential IDEWG as sugar daddies. The WG is a mechanism build a platform for companies to give voice to their needs and pain points and finding people that have the resources to fix them. In addition, if an IDEWG member plans to create a totally new feature set, than he'd probably sponsor development of a new Eclipse project rather than taking over an existing one.
Summing up, the existing team of committers and the project leads (for a project contributed to) would (IMHO) still be the authority that decides what goes in or doesn't. If this leads to discussions, this would be taken to some councils or the Foundation. But honestly, I don't expect this to happen.
Marcel |