I for one have spent over 20 years continually expanding my application, as free GPL software, and I stopped counting the hours long ago.
It is a gigantic amount of effort to design non-trivial software. Heck, just keeping everything stable and up-to-date is a project in itself (periodically having to adopt modern platform APIs, for instance).
And usually I receive very little feedback. I can see downloads in the thousands and I doubt I've had more than a few E-mails a year.
You might be misled by the tendency for people to hack random things together and dump them on GitHub, never to be touched again.
It is a gigantic amount of effort to design non-trivial software. Heck, just keeping everything stable and up-to-date is a project in itself (periodically having to adopt modern platform APIs, for instance).
And usually I receive very little feedback. I can see downloads in the thousands and I doubt I've had more than a few E-mails a year.
You might be misled by the tendency for people to hack random things together and dump them on GitHub, never to be touched again.