there is nothing wrong with commisioned work as long as it adds value to the coin, community or something else.
we can only imagine how much the dev has on his desk right now. juggling many aspects of such a project requires knowledge in a wide variety of skills. Project management and team lead is as important as the pure getting-dirty programming footwork. Having a bunch of capable programmers step in and close some of the open tasks is propably just the right thing to do.
This is why the XC dev has already done what took the DRK dev months.
In fact if XC dev can get this working properly this will actually be superior to DRK.
Anything the XC dev can outsource to someone else eg testnet, DNS seeder etc, he is doing so... which means he can spend more time on the code.
4-5 Dev + Dan is working right now on XC.