What a load of crap that is. Did he actually say that? "Gimme money pl0x, we hire better people"
I think it's more a case of a lot of the 'core' team devs also need to work in order to, you know, feed themselves and pay bills etc. So work on Monero has to fit around that. If they had more donations, they could spend more time focusing on Monero or pay other developers to work on details whilst they coordinate the effort. Unless you think they should just work for free/pay developers out of their own pockets because they owe it to you somehow?
This is what happens with a 'fair launch' where the developer hasn't pre/insta-mined a lot of the coin themselves. The only Monero they will have is from their own mining endeavours and any donations they receive, so they're not sitting on a mountain of coin they can sell fund development.
It is as simple as this.
There are a lot of separate work items. We are burning through them as fast as we can, with a combination of core dev time, volunteers, and programmers we have hired for specific tasks. We can't do them all at once, and we have to prioritize. But the more funding we have, the more hours we get from the paid developers and the more time core devs can afford to put into the project, and potentially we can hire more programmers too (but we will only hire people we are sure are highly qualified regardless of how much funding is available).
Everything we think is important will get done, either way, but more funding (and more qualified volunteers) means more gets done faster.
In all honestly I don't think everything needs to happen right away anyway. A lot needs to move into place before adoption can become much more widespread, and not all of that involves software development at all. So maybe don't take this as saying we don't need funding, because we do, but it isn't as necessary as the instant gratification seekers might suggest.