I wonder what an org would look like where engineers got compensated as well as salespeople--as a percentage of sales, where if you made a great product that sold like gangbusters, you got showered with money, but if it doesn't sell you get very little or fired. I bet at the very least the products would look very, very different.
You could make the argument that in (growing) startups, this is closer to the way things are- engineers create value over longer time periods (and efforts are often harder to tie directly to economic value creation). Equity-based comp is a good way to compensate for these kinds of efforts.
You might be onto something. Paying devs this way could stop the rewrite in new the js framework flavor of the month over and over, and instead put focus on adding features and fixing bugs.
