As with everything, there's not just one cause. Yes, corporate dependency is undoubtedly part of it. Public-only funding of campaigns is something I think needs to have come about a long time ago. But another problem is that these people have always been lawmakers, and their form of productivity is adding stuff to the corpus of laws. They're like the framework designers making a framework that's completely out of touch with the real needs of coders using their stuff, because they've only ever been framework designers. They are functionally not very competent, and that is a problem.

There's no single silver bullet here - there need to be reforms in more than a few directions.