The main problem with your story is that there is no "main dev from inkscape". There's a rag tag group of fairly junior developers and amazing support volunteers.
But, I could see how the story could get twisted over time. I'm pretty sure I've never shared my bank account details and I'm the worst bastard at Inkscape for asking users to contribute, all users, in any way they can. This is because contributions are lifeblood, not users. Adobe is great because 90% of their users are contributors where as 0.01% of Inkscape users ever contribute.
So consider contributing your passion about Inkscape at chat.inkscape.org there's a ux team and everything.
I did not follow development of inkcape and the message I mean, was from around 10+ years ago .. in an interview with whom it sounded like the main dev at the time(don't remember the name). And the statement was a bit hyperbole as well, to get across the point, "you want a lot of things, so send a lot of money, so I can hire lots of people to make them happen, otherwise be patient"
So no worries, no one today is (afaik) abusing inkscape ..
My point is that people don't understand the necessity for a "vision guy" to direct UX in any program of appreciable size. And it's not like these kinds of people don't exist, or that they'd be unwilling to help. People just don't seem to even WANT them taking on these tasks on their projects.
And that's a real shame, because many of these projects are technical wonders that are borderline unusable for want of a loving touch.
When you are the main dev in such a project, would you be willing to give this huge responsibility to some guy who might loose interest after a few weeks? What then?
Also, I have seen people doing graphical sketches of possible UI's and people think nice - but it is a whole different thing to actually implement this (especially with so little money involved), when the to do list involves 10 million other things.
Also, usually the problem is the designers are not coders and quite often the code base is not designed in a way, where you can just swap out the UI for a new one.
But yes, I'd love to see more collaboration of designers with a vision and coders.
That seems a reasonable way to support additional features in an open source project, especially if the volunteer developers have no personal interest in the feature.
A one-line comment would be a bit brief. "This feature isn't planned, but one of the core developers would be willing to take on the work for payment. If that's interesting to you, we will estimate the cost."
That I am not criticizing the inkscape devs, for having implemented such a bad text support. They had other priorities and people like me, who would have liked it, did not pay enough money, to have it implemented. Simple as that. So the other comment was not neccesary.
Ah yeah, I remember, this is why I stopped digging more into it, after weird starting results.
And I remembered my main issue with inkscape: text editing. I would actually consider it broken beyond repair at the current state. Which is sad, as otherwise I am really happy with inkscape.
But I also very clearly remember the statement from the main dev from inkscape, when people ask him, if the next version of inkscape could have feature xyz:
he then just replies with a one liner, his bank account number.