> The question is why there isn’t enough money, given that there obviously is a lot of interest from big players.

I'd argue that there wasn't actually much interest until recently, and that's because it is only recently that interest in the CPython ecosystem has intersected with interest in speed that has money behind it, because of the sudden broad relevance to commercial business of the Python scientific stack for data science.

Both Unladen Swallow and IronPython were driven by interest in Python as a scripting language in contexts detached from, or at least not necessarily attached to, the existing CPython ecosystem.