It depends on how you define contributing, I do not actively contribute source due to the fact that I do not want a conflict of interest to arise on ownership of IP with a client. But I am heavily involved in beta /release candidate testing for several projects as well as bug report submission and general community information dissemination all of these things are passive contributions to the projects and communities around those projects.

I picked a hard problem (Drupal Performance) and worked on a open source project (Boost Module) for about 7 months till I was approached by a company and offered a job. This was an exit strategy I had in mind, get highered. I'm now paid to work on performance related issues & I enjoy it. When it comes to performance, I open source (GPLv2) most of my code since sharing is the fastest way to solve complex issues involving speed and scalability.

All of this to say if you don't find the open source work exciting, maybe you picked the wrong problem for you to solve. Now that I have a 9-5 job, I have less time to perfect the free software I've created. If it works 100% for the biz, why would they want to pay me (time) to fix problems the biz doesn't have.

I've spent time in various open source projects and Drupal was the first one where something stuck (people wanted to higher me). Luck has a lot to do with it; picking the right project at the right time. I've been contributing to Open Source since 2004, 2009 was the first time someone saw my code/work and wanted to higher me.

I think those people are actually not that significant when compared to some other main contributing parties such as university professors, grad students, independent consultants, and those employed by companies explicitly supporting free software.

You are also probably relatively happy with the tools you already have available to you, which is fine.