With regard to getting changes made: Both V8 and the ECMAScript committee have development mailing lists and issue trackers where you can submit and discuss suggestions. AFAIK, this is basically the same way Ruby operates. They aren't likely to make vast, crazy changes, but I don't think, say, a PEP for static typing would get very far either.
And I think it's kind of a basic misconception that V8 is made just with web browsers in mind. If you look on the V8 developer site, nowhere does it say anything close to that. Their stated objective is "fast execution of large JavaScript applications." They go out of their way to draw a distinction between the browser and the engine, explaining what is and isn't part of JavaScript (e.g. the DOM is just an interface that browsers choose to expose). Is Chrome the original client for V8? Sure. And shell scripts were the original use case for Python. It seems to me that "V8 is just a browser language" is the new "Python is just a scripting language."
And I wouldn't describe the language-level ability to write asynchronous code in a synchronous fashion a fundamental feature. It's really cool and allows a lot of expressiveness, but so would a lot of potential changes in, say, Ruby. If you don't want the language feature, there are really nice libraries that get you most of the way there. (And I don't really see how the existence of CoffeeScript or ICS is any more an indictment of V8 than the existence of Scala is of the JVM. Choice is a good thing. Lots of people prefer vanilla JavaScript.)
And I think it's kind of a basic misconception that V8 is made just with web browsers in mind. If you look on the V8 developer site, nowhere does it say anything close to that. Their stated objective is "fast execution of large JavaScript applications." They go out of their way to draw a distinction between the browser and the engine, explaining what is and isn't part of JavaScript (e.g. the DOM is just an interface that browsers choose to expose). Is Chrome the original client for V8? Sure. And shell scripts were the original use case for Python. It seems to me that "V8 is just a browser language" is the new "Python is just a scripting language."
And I wouldn't describe the language-level ability to write asynchronous code in a synchronous fashion a fundamental feature. It's really cool and allows a lot of expressiveness, but so would a lot of potential changes in, say, Ruby. If you don't want the language feature, there are really nice libraries that get you most of the way there. (And I don't really see how the existence of CoffeeScript or ICS is any more an indictment of V8 than the existence of Scala is of the JVM. Choice is a good thing. Lots of people prefer vanilla JavaScript.)