Smarty & Pear isnt snap together anything there is still coding that needs to be done.
Smarty:
http://smarty.php.net
This is nothing more than a template engine. It is etremely reobust and works well between programmers and designers. You can pretty much accomplish any layout objective you want with this templating set of code. It even has built in page caching to help reduce overhead on database query calls (of course you need to program that in.) It is also very expandable by writing modules/functions etc to extend the use of their existing template classes.
Pear:
http://pear.php.net
Pear is a set of classes that can be used for numerous things, from DB abstraction to logging, ftp etc. Again you can extend PEAR with your own classes and take advantage of the base functions. I mostly use the DB abstraction layer so that the code is cross RDBMS compatible.
Even though you use these functions there is still coding, design, db structure process and organization that needs to be done. Creating an opensource application needs to have a few things.
1. A good gameplan.
2. A good infrastructure and updating/release scheme.
3. A good project manager.
4. Programmers
Sure once person could do most of this work and I would be more than happy to lend a hand as I said, but it would have to be more than just me to do it. Realistically if we could get 3-4 programmers and 1 project manager the project could probably go pretty fast. The reason I say 3-4 programmers is because 1, you could get it done faster, and 2 because most of us are already super busy you would need 4 of em to keep progress moving.
As far as outsourcing to India that could be something you might want to do but that wont work imho for a typical open source project.
Andy