are the Bitcoin developers committed to building an open standard for Bitcoin that is a family of specifications of intended behavior for Bitcoin clients of various kinds that work independently of their implementations or are they committed to releasing [official] clients that require people to rely on core devs to keep up with changes in the Bitcoin source code. It would appear that these two motives cannot operate harmoniously.
I do not think there is any conflict of interest, here, save perhaps the ever-present conflict of short- versus long-term interests in a capitolist system.
The developers, as probable holders of large sums of Bitcoin, are invested in the optimal success of the ecosystem. This ecosystem will thrive and with it the value of the Bitcoin they hold will prosper in direct proportion to it's usefulness and adoption as a payment platform. To that end, obviously an open standard and a bazaar model will have the most powerful effect.
The only conflict of interest is one of short term gain, of potential for someone to choose to try to short change the future of the ecosystem for a very short term and limited scope profit.