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@Igor The Blender Foundation's developer blog provides some valuable insights. The team actually made some organizational changes in how to approach development this year: https://code.blender.org/2021/02/module-teams-for-core-blender-development/ https://code.blender.org/ The fast development of certain features is also fed by pure need: they've always worked as an animation studio delivering open film projects. These projects motivate the implementation of new feature sets as required. https://www.blender.org/about/projects/ For example, the Blender Studio entity is now working on a feature film quality animation with an experienced former Pixar story supervisor as a director. https://cloud.blender.org/films/sprite-fright/ I've noticed that these projects are one of the prime drivers behind improved tool sets and pipelines in Blender. And during these periods of working on open film projects new developers and people with different mindsets were attracted and hired as well. But the uptake of Blender in commercial studios has also been a boost for its development. The Blender development team consists of 24 people now, I believe. But aside from those, some studios and their developers are sharing their work and code as well. This is one of the advantages of the open source model in this case. And that is aside from external developers contributing smaller things to the overall code base and the default add-ons which are shipped with Blender. Then there are a few incredibly motivated artists who also happen to be excellent coders (a relatively rare combination). Pablo Dabarro, the person behind Blender's Sculpt mode improvements is a very accomplished artist and built the tools he envisioned in Blender. The 2d animation tools were imagined and built by a small external team of 2d animators. The programmer and lead Antonio Vazquez lives in Spain. So Blender sees external developers with creative minds working all over the world to improve the tools and implement rather imaginative new features. People who work with these tools themselves in a production environment and are not part of the official Blender Foundation teams. https://www.blender.org/development/top-20-blender-developers-in-2020/ And don't forget that PUBLIC recognition for these developers can be a massive personal motivational driver. Remember Atari 8bit era: Atari management at the time refused to give their game programmers due credit - they were seen as regular anonymous labour. With the result that many left, and set up their own companies (David Crane & Pitfall! Activision, Imagine, ....) Developers are humans with the innate need to be acknowledged for their work too. In the world of Blender this is recognized. I can name several Blender developers, who all have a following, but I can name no Cinema4D ones, except of course the Losch brothers. Does anyone here know of any 'famous' autodesk developers? Probably not. The core developer behind Cycles left the Blender Foundation at some point to work for Otoy, only to return and continue work at BF. He is 'famous' in the Blender community, while at Otoy he was just a regular paid employee. I am making assumptions here, but I do feel his return to Blender is partly motivated by the sense of making a difference and being recognized as an individual for his work. Two of us humans' prime motivators. In my opinion it is also much more difficult for a closed-off development environment (such as Maxon, AutoDesk, Foundry) to remain truly creative and forward-thinking. The commercial entities behind these companies generally choke true original vision in favour of keeping the investors happy. Not always, of course, but when we look at small start-up companies in this industry - those are the ones often delivering new ways of working and novel tools. Just like C4D did up until 2008, or so. Blender, even though it has grown this much, still attracts and harbours that mindset. One merely has to have a look at some of the imaginative tools and plugins that are written for it. ( Sorry, quick detour here) I recall when Cinema4D was first introduced on the Amiga: it felt fresh, different, super easy compared to other options. It was affordable. I remember when the final Amiga version of C4D was given away on a cover disk. I made the switch to PC and continued to work with C4D. It introduced some really cool tools like Body Paint. And MoGraph! Wow, that was truly amazing. It got C4D recognized and adopted - rather even created its own unique niche in the market of motion graphics. I invested a LOT of money in Cinema4D. So many plugins, all those modules. Fun times. And now? C4D is driven to subscription (rental) only, forward-thinking tools were left to rot away and were overtaken years and years ago by new kids (Body Paint, etc.), the development is somewhat confused (ProRender was proclaimed as the new main render engine, then stalled, now no longer developed, but a real replacement Redshift is a separate purchase, so now C4D no longer has a proper modern native renderer?) When did C4D development become so reactive, rather than innovative as it used to be? And Blender's developers can take risks. We've seen two major overhauls so far. Take Newtek LightWave: management pulled the plug on Core, which would have been a modernized overhaul of LW. It was seen as a money pit and too risky. Result: LightWave is dead. Most users left long ago, and only a lingering smaller community is left. Development stalled, and all the developers left. Blender really took off after with v2.8. They just keep innovating and taking risks, because they can. Taking risks is anathema to a larger company with investor stakeholders to satisfy. No other DCC development team would have thought it was a good idea to implement 2d drawing and animation tools in their 3d app. But it has resulted in a few Japanese 2d animation studios to switch to Blender and fix 3d cell rendered images by hand directly in the 3d environment. But the same things can be said about Adobe and its products. Large companies more often than not stifle innovation, and when those same companies adopt software rental schemes it is a sign of lack of innovation driving them there to keep the money flowing rather than anything else. Sorry, I am digressing here. Water under the bridge. What I meant to say: Blender and its community has that "fresh" grass-roots feel going for them, still after all these years. It attracts developers like flies, it seems. It's open, collaborative. Innovative and imaginative. It is an environment where developers may take risks, be innovative, and be rewarded for it. Anyway, in short: - core team of ~24 people - external teams and individual developers who are extremely driven and passionate and artists themselves - recognition for individual developers - a prime motivator for humans - commercial studio teams with developers contributing to standard Blender - Blender Foundation funded open film projects which boost development and temporarily boosts staff - industry taking note, and investing swaths of money in Blender. Unreal, Electronic Arts, etcetera. Also contributing to new features here and there. - scores of small add-on developers. All of which means a pretty huge crowd of motivated developers, both paid and unpaid. Which is difficult to compete with in the semi-long run, in my opinion. https://www.blender.org/about/