[magduf]

Yeah, but much of the reason I think there's as much volunteer involvement as there is is because distros are different, and the volunteers are happier to contribute their time to something they believe in.

If you have fewer distributions, that means they're going to make design choices more people won't like, which means volunteers aren't going to be as interested in contributing. You can't please all the people all the time, remember. A small number of distros will equate to making lots of compromises, so no one will be happy. This works for corporate products, because people are getting paid to work on something they don't care much about, but it doesn't work for a volunteer project.

Just as an example: if I were working on, say, Linux Mint, but then all the distro maintainers decided to have a giant meeting and in it they decided we really only need one Linux distro, CentOS, I'd just quit. There's no way in hell I'd want to work on CentOS of all things. I can find more enjoyable ways of spending my free time. I'm sure you'll find this with anything that people are passionate about: if you try to get them to redirect their energy to something "boring", they're not going to do it.