This is a situation I have thought about a lot as well and it is a major problem in crypto for sure.
The DAO typically don't work because you have to do the following.
- Buy A Huge Stake To Prove Your Allegiance
- Already Built A Full Implementation
- Have the reputation and support of others with huge stake
After all that it is usually going to make more sense to just build something yourself or just build on a top 10 chain that meets your needs if possible.
Funding in general has been a huge problem and any additional add on functionality to the ecosystem would have needed to be figured out somewhat before hand.
Even getting paid enough to just focus on crypto fulltime is a problem at this point even in a bull market.
I agree with you that the ability to take DeFi loans has been one of the major innovations out of all of this.
Complex ecosystems expect devs to just come and work and advertise for free and there are only a few projects that really captured that magic.
Guys work on Linux distros and various open source software projects for free which I have never fully understood but then it seems hard to get that similar effort for some of the crypto tech. It might be because once it seems like someone has money then people sort of expect a bag 💰 dropped on their head.