Maybe the quality would improve? There's a condition I call "open-source-itis" that a lot of projects suffer from, where tons of new features (usually of dubious merit) get added but nobody ever bothers to fix bugs or make sure the foundation is actually solid. It makes sense, because that's unsexy work that people generally don't want to do and they're all working for free, but it makes a lot of open source software really crap.

However, if people were getting paid for fixing bugs and cleaning up old code, maybe that'd improve.

You can describe any software that way.

Big new headline features are a marketers wet dream.

"We fixed that annoying bug that affected 4 people last year" not so much.

Also, "driving for uber" is hardly a great thing to aspire to.

I'd expect it to get worse. People pay for features over maintenance even more strongly than they allocate prestige.

Nah, there's a bug out there right now blocking my work I'd throw money at if I could. I can't be the only one who feels like this.

Rich, the creator of the Phaser framework, does something like this (I haven't dug into it much): https://github.com/photonstorm/phaser/issues/3390

It appears they leverage Bountysource (not familiar with it).

In my line of work there are perverse incentives for hyping up new stuff and then not dealing with bugs and problems. It's not been me doing that but I've suffered by comparison against others who embraced that dark pattern.

Complaints are publicity. They bump internet discussions, create buzz, and often go along with protestations of 'I really love (FooBazBar), I promise it's the best thing ever, now if you would only fix this bug…' and then angry flames over the bugs and defenders coming to protect the honor of FooBazBar.

Fix bugs and people are happy and stop talking. They return to happily using the product. Again, we're talking perverse incentives for just the sort of obnoxious behavior you describe, or worse.

a lot of abandoned project will get revived