2k/mo would pay for 37 devs for a year. Rather than that do micropayments for contributions (approved packages, finished tasks). A project such as Debian only needs a few core members or people working on important projects paid full time. It works for FreeBSD.

I really like Debian but volunteers are probably better off packaging for other distros such as Arch or Alpine with simpler packaging/better tooling and less strict rules. One thing to improve would be tooling to make packages.