I trust (as far as my feelings, the market and the brutal test of time can assure) Shen, the Monero team and gmaxwell but from my readings it seems TPTB_need_war may have a breakthrough of some kind in the area of math and anonymization (of quanties), what is exactly what Shen and the Monero team is researching, if he and knowledged parts of the Monero team could dialogue in secret (because he doesn't want to reveal any part of his research he says the Monero team is "copying" but has no way to find out), and if it is found he has an useful, unprecendented method that can translate into code for betterment of the Monero network, I can see a crowdfunding motion having success or he eventually takes the highest bidder.
I'd really like to receive about $75,000 total for the work already done plus assisting on implementation. If I am not mistaken, the guy who was selected to optimize Monero's mining algorithm pocketed an alleged $150,000 worth of coins before releasing the optimization generally.
I know this is not true and you make it sound everyone involved in coding for Monero is making rivers of money which is unrealistic as the core devs are literally making most for free if not in the red already (no IPO, no premine), and most coders working and submitting on github at the moment were funded by the community.