The first few months of shadow I was completely oblivious to the fact that whales.. The more things progressed, the more people were offering funds to hire extra developers, managers, technical writers, journalists, etc.
The team has obviously grown, and it took me a while to realise I'm no longer able to make decisions on my own, but it seems to be moving forward. I really don't like the delayed open source thing, but I guess you need to protect investments for a bit.
The whales also tend to know allot about other whales, and obviously they've been in the game allot longer than late adopters, so they have very valuable input most of the time.
I would definitely enjoy developing allot more if there wasn't a direct monetary value, and if people didn't care about the price.
Some day people will realise that this is all epic research and experimentation, and that the monetary value is actually curbing the innovation, because they constantly asking are we there yet, and if you miss a deadline or there's a bug or a hack that the developers weren't in control of, the whales can put a massive dent in an entire communities investment.