what about a model where people pay it forward. if we had a way to pool capital and invest that capital to generate a revenue stream, that revenue stream could be used to help pay developers. That's an idea that I have had forever, and it makes sense on a firm monetary foundation like Bitcoin. and the main income stream that we have is Bitcoin mining itself. so we would need mining pools set up to receive the capital pools.
Discussion
Then your product is a security (an investment product), like GBTC for instance. Endowments tend to work like that. The downside is that you can only use the extra profits after adjusted for inflation, which usually means that you have to group billions to take hundreds of thousands of dollars to be competitive with similar products in the market.
On a pure Bitcoin based system, inflation doesn't really play a role. But I hear what you are saying. We would need institutional support for something like this within the US, and the SEC would want to put their thumb on the scale no matter where it was based if US Citizens are putting capital into it.
I HATE ads. I hate the advertising model as much as I hate fiat itself. There has got to be a better way to do this.