[bombcar]

Honestly, there may be great programmers amongst the kernel and SQLite maintainers, but they may stay around for other reasons. Some great programmers like working on a particular piece of tooling.

But many companies don't really allow "maintenance" of software as you describe it - the heady early days where anything goes are pretty free-form, but once you get into the normal business cycle it's just adding features and keeping it from exploding. The problem really becomes apparent when the company has a culture of promoting/rewarding the programmers who do create and ignoring or ostracizing the ones that maintain.