Not every developer is a highly paid superstar in Silicon Valley. When needing to juggle family / life, I'm sure this proposed model would make it a lot easier to explain to the wife/husband/partner why they need to stay up a bit longer at night to work on their (previously) non-paying projects.
I'm not saying that's what they are, but somehow I got the impression that maintainers of projects that are good enough to attract payments for pulls, would have marketable skills, and be ahead, regardless of the market they live in.
As a potential contributor I need to know whether there's a professional process or a guy "playing with trains" on the other end of the wire.
The problem is that the FLOSS ecosystem doesn't give you an easy way to tell. So if I misjudge and hit a wall of dysfunction, the general response would be, "Well, the maintainer just wants to play with trains. Leave them alone and fork the project if you want it to be some other way."
At least with paying to contribute, it would force the FLOSS ecosystem general response to be, "Those maintainers are just playing with trains, but they're taking money as if they are professional engineers. That's bad." Of course that's worst case scenario-- best case is that they really are engineers and I'm funding their development. Either way, it's potentially better than the status quo which is that you have no idea until you submit the patch.
