It woud help if you'd have a clear and transparent plan on each of your private releases regarding how long will you plan on working on it.
One would even expect that your nicehash private release for random 0-5% would include decred as well but it's not.
That means that it's hard to invest even just 0.1 when nobody knows how much actual value they are going to get and for how long before you change things up.
Especially because only a few miners can afford to 0.1 for practically a pig in a poke. It's a useless arbitrary amount that small miners can't afford; big miners can buy without second thouhts while medium miners won't buy because it's not valuable enough.
I'm thinking it would be much better for everyone involved if the community would collectively donate for whatever optimizations they want.