I don’t understand. It’s pretty reasonable to say that editor features, etc. are not worth the money if they are not noticeable to the basic user, which presumably accounts for the overwhelmingly vast majority of Wikipedia page views.
Source: continuously edited since 2007, and continue in large part due to improved tools.
Do you think that $40 million is a reasonable cost for those improvements?
And yes, it's reasonable. I work in tech as a software engineer and it's not as cheap as people think.
But you’re right, plenty more companies burn through that without much to show for so in comparison WMF aren’t doing too bad, I guess. It still sounds somewhat excessive to me though.
People have finite attention spans and often ignore what isn’t clearly broken.