Good for you, apparently $1500 isn't worth a 40 hour work week, probably not even that if you're as good as you make yourself out to be. There are plenty of programmers that get paid less, especially in other countries outside the US. Also why I mentioned kernel development here needs more competition. Some of you are pretty laid back... in a multitude of areas and want to get paid premium dollars for that. Meanwhile SP releases his work open source and you just build on top of it.
This is exactly why you guys don't advertise your services. You wouldn't want anyone to catch on just how lucrative this work is and there is plenty of programmers that are qualified in C++/Cuda/OCL, just not familiar with BCT or mining.
There IS NO COMPETITION here! Literally anyone could come in and swipe this out, but most people don't even know this is a fundamental part of mining yet. They just download whatever miner pops up and think they're set because these guys don't advertise. There is a ton of potential hashrate sitting there to be used for profit. The risk is quite minimal as well compared to getting into mining. There will always be people mining, regardless of what they're mining on and what BTC is at. So you basically need CUDA and OCL programmers, then someone to write a front end for it (or you simply ask someone like Nwolls on that already has one done).
Honestly it shouldn't matter who 'reaps the most from this'. DJM seems to be stuck on this note of people profiting off his work, even though he's selling it. It's two different things. Do gas stations get pissed off because oil tycoons or truck companies make so much money? No. They're a gas station, that's not their MO. If they had the resources to be a oil tycoon they probably wouldn't be a gas station anymore... or the oil tycoons simply buy up the gas stations.
(a) I think you're missing some of djm's points: In a bounty, the developer takes on all of the risk. There's a decent chance of failing to get a 20% speedup after a month of work. That's kinda sucky, particularly when contract programming work pays better anyway.
(b) $1500/week is low for a good US programmer.
http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/software-developer/salary2013 average software dev salary was over $92k/year ($1769/week), and the ones who can crank out a 50% improvement on the Monero miner are closer to that top 10% figure -- think $150k/year and up. The bounty also doesn't include benefits and the other nice things offered by a standard employer.
I base this upon knowing personally a few of the people who ship some of the highest performance mining code. Many are not US based, but I know what their day jobs would pay if they were here. (It's probably more than $150k/year.)
Freelancing generally needs to quote double the hourly rate of a salaried position when you take everything into account, which means that a US programmer earning $150k per year needs to charge about $150/hour -- or about $6000 for a full 40 hour week, not the $1500 you mentioned.
I ran the numbers on doing this as a business a while ago, and it's not clear that it's worth it given the other things you could do with the software talent you need.
-Dave