1) Godot: No. Godot is doing pretty well with the resources they have. Making a 2D/3D game engine is an incredibly complex task and they have only a handful of people writing code. To compete with unreal and unity they'd have to have a ton of funding, a layer of FOSS-competent management (a somewhat rare thing), and many more developers.
2) Gimp: Yes but that will never happen. Gimp has a handful of issues. They're chained to a difficult framework and a large amount of the value they provide as a tool comes from their plugin library so they can't just start ripping things out. They also have rather questionable branding (both in the name and the splashscreens, especially the ones in development versions) and a hearty resistance towards throwing on even a veneer of professionalism. Whether or not they should change to fit what the rest of the world considers appropriate is a philosophical question I'm not touching, but the effect of their not doing so is pretty evident.
Krita (a very well managed project in comparison) has basically eaten Gimp's lunch for a lot of workflows and will continue to do so while gimp withers away (which has basically already happened, gimp's GTK3 builds are only just now about to release, 10 years after the first GTK3 release and right after GTK4 dropped -- bear in mind that GTK was originally developed as a custom widget toolkit specifically for gimp).
As I recall, pricing of 3D modeling/animation/rendering suites was much steeper when Blender started gathering momentum.
[Checks pricing]
Umm, it looks like the price is still quite high (Maya and Max are each $1.6k/y). Where are you getting that figure from?
- Blender came out of commercial, and the community was never really anti-commercial. Lots of classic FOSS communities have trouble identifying with paid development for example, worrying it will lead to a form of classicism in the community, etc. Blender, OTOH, tried to make sure there's core staff doing it fulltime basically from the get-go, I think. This makes a lot of stuff happen - taking care of not-fun things, having stable contact points, professionalism, doing good fundraising, etc.
- Blender took dogfooding seriously, with their open movie projects
- Blender took user research seriously, running events and inviting artists over and watching them use the software
- Blender did good community management, with Blender Artists and other initiatives
- In Blender's area integration, automation, tooling are all very complex, and they made some good key decisions, e.g. adopting Python for scripting just when Python was becoming the default programming language for non-programmers
- Because the application domain Blender is in is so complex, training is important, and the competition probably underestimated making their products affordable for teaching institutions (call me out if wrong, I am not as confident on this point). Blender supported creation of training materials pretty well, too
They simply got a lot of things right. Projects that paid attention (e.g. Krita) are also blossoming.