[londons_explore]

The solution here is for authors of the eye-catching features to re-spend some of the rewards on infrastructure they depend on.

If a blender dev wants to improve perf and finds that the bottleneck is in some Linux kernel component, they should post a bounty for improving that component.

[ludston]

The problem with this is that they could also just pocket the money, and then they have more money.

[atoav]

Yeah, that is not how the blender institute works.

The question how to balance spending on Blender features vs dependencies is a legit one though. Blender "is killing it" because for years they never chose the easy fix or the low hanging fruit over sustainable changes.

In addition to that the Blender dev community is really goal oriented. Not many holy cows, everybody is just focused on the result. Imagine how Blender's 2.80 changes would've panned out in any typical Open Source project — often they can't strike the balance between old and new users, a lot of bikeshedding, infighting, forks, ...

Blender is killing it because there is a great community that is focused on the results. The influx of money could also have derailed the Blender project, but it didn't, which is further proof that they are doing something right.