Yes, but look how much of the software economy's infrastructure* depends on underfunded products. OpenSSH, GnuPG and OpenSSL are just 3 projects which are installed on pretty much every Linux server on the internet, including the servers of billion-dollar-businesses. It got a lot better in recent years, but still: Quite a few economically viable software companies just depend on free labor for mission-critical software product which take a lot of resources to become solid.

And while we are at it: http://www.openbsdfoundation.org https://gnupg.org/donate/ https://www.openssl.org/support/donations.html

Can't it be both? We need it right now and we don't need to to work perfectly or last forever.

Really, we're talking about the same thing like they're two separate things: The software [1] (in this case, SQLite) and the application (whatever tables, queries, etc. you need to solve your problem) are used together. So we build the poorly tested, quick and dirty application on top of the well tested, solid software.

[1] Yes, I realize that "software" is a terribly generic term to use to mean "well designed and tested software" and that "application" is also a terribly generic term to use to mean "hastily designed and untested software". Feel free to mentally substitute your own terms if you have better ones.