This makes me think I should take emails/comments less important. These are not customers, they are fans.
If it's my project,I should just enjoy it for myself.
While it sounds great to personally respond and research what people tell me, it's a major distraction and time waste when I could be doing research.
If an open-source project grows to the point where time is insufficient to maintain it alongside your day-to-day job, then the matter of money becomes inevitable. And I'm not talking about allocating one's entire free time to the project, but just the time one assesses to be reasonable for this hobby, which can be rather short because of other occupations (rest, family, other hobbies, etc).