Honest questions get honest answers. First, it is necessary to distinguish two classes of activities in any large-scale project.
The first class includes feature-development activities. These activities bring new features to the existing systems. I call them existential, as one successful attempt makes you successful. Everyone likes them. These tasks are easily parallelizable and suitable for open-source (bazaar) style development. Nav2, MoveIt, and ros2_control development belong to this class. No problem with those…
The second class is about infrastructure, maintenance, testing, documentation, etc… I call them universal tasks, as a single failure makes you fail. You do not get much credit for doing them and get the worst criticism if you cannot succeed. You cannot leave them to the community, as failures are costly. This is where the Foundation cannot delegate its responsibility to the community. This is where the most problems lie and I tell that to the Foundation whenever I see such an attempt:
Instead, the Foundation should seek sustainable solutions by organizing/taxing their member companies. Shifting the burden/blame to the community is not nice. This is why foundations exist.