You tell us to forget bounties and airdrops, you are correct, but there is a huge problem in what you give as a better alternative. It takes years, maybe even decades to become a top developer and write good code. It takes knowledge of cryptography too if you are reading or writing code when it comes to blockchains and cryptocurrencies. Some probably copy large portions of the code from other wallets and probably don't even care to understand it completely, so they are left with hundreds of bugs and incomplete products. Of course there are some people that can manage to learn everything easier, and can only take a year or two to be ready and code anything they want.
However, for the rest of us which is the 99,9999% we can't spend years trying to learn to code. So we stick to what we can do.