[outsomnia]

It seems we agree eg, a paid dev's feature request is not comparable to the paid dev contributing the feature itself via discussion with the maintainer.

Nor is it comparable to the maintainer stopping what they are doing to sit there and provide the feature as if their time was worth less than that of the paid dev who wants to consume it.

[jka]

Regardless of whether the contributor is paid, I think that feature requests and bug reports can be compared to feature implementations.

If the feature request includes, for example, technical architecture and product design analysis, and illustrates that it has considered various other options, it could be highly valuable.

A bug report could have involved significant debugging to identify approximate causes, affected versions, and potentially-related commits that introduced/regressed the bug.

All of the above applies to documentation and support commentary too. There is a spectrum with any contribution from 'minimal' to 'thorough', and there's not necessarily a causal link between high-value contributions and paid work.