Expecting a developer who hasn't yet worked in the gimp codebase to make a meaningful contribution worth a positive dollar value in an hour is vastly under-estimating the cost of ramping up a developer.

In reality, if everyone in this thread tried to contribute to gimp for an hour, I expect we'd get two patches of any value out of it, and about 100 hours of time that did nothing but negatively impacted existing gimp developers.

There are two realistic outcomes from a "1 hour to contribute something" thing:

1. A trivial patch which causes more lost time ($) for the existing gimp developers than it creates value

2. A developer jumping into irc and trying to ramp up, which for about the first 6 hours of time will likely be a drain on the existing developers with no positive value return until at least 15 work-hours of the developer ramping up (and that's assuming a developer who is already quite experienced and can ramp up pretty efficiently. For some developers, the numbers would be vastly worse).

I would go so far as to argue that part of gimp's less intuitive UI is because of having more developers, and if there were fewer developers total the UI would be more cohesive.