Thanks for introducing yourself. All of your suggestions for getting involved are good ones.
We need to check you have signed the contribution agreement before accepting your pull requests, GitHub should've given you a "contributing" link when you submitted the pull request?
People general submit pull requests and gain the trust of the project team before being nominated as a committer. We also have a bit of work coming up as we juggle some of the dependencies prior to our initial release.
I have "just" removed the vecmath dependency from the upstream GeoTools project and we need to try out the result.
There are a few other dependencies that we need to sort out, one of the more tricky ones is a java plugin library used to tie together the "osmosis" library. We need to see if we can remove the dependency by connecting just the osmosis classes we need for OSM import/export. Worst case senario we will need to fork a few of the osmosis classes into our codebase, would like to reach out to the osmosis team before taking that step.
In anycase welcome to the project we look forward to working with you.