[JamesLeonis]

It does appear to be the 90-9-1% rule of the Internet at play, but you might be on to something.

In a more traditional organization you would have architects and other senior development leads plowing the way with a number of subordinates that provide the necessary but dirty grunt work scaffolding around the central architecture. It's not that they're doing more work. Instead they are charging through the hard problems that more junior developers struggle around, but don't have the time to dive deep into tiny implementation details required for large projects.

The interesting data would likely come from these closed sourced projects and complement the data of the open projects. I would love to see that analysis and comparison.