Hi Ben
Its a pity that your post did not have a title. I think it is an important question.
This was originally one of the most important reasons of creating the dotlrn consortium. Kind of coordinating the development of the toolkit (dotlrn).
I don't think we got the model totally right with regards to what you express.
I even have the idea that large users and consultants should try to pay something to a common pool of money that is used to do all the bits that no single company/organization wants to do. In Moodle for example they pay a percent of their project cost to the Moodle guy who uses (part of) it to develop the core further.
cheers
Rafael
