I guess in a way, OAI chose the right approach in neglecting Dall-E and basically left the scene to Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. I think with their capability and resources, OAI can easily make something competitive to the current Midjourney and SD but they instead focused on the bigger picture to better fit their capabilities.

Small models on the scale of a few billions parameters is probably best left to crowd sourcing efforts because almost everyone can do it. Dealing with large models like GPT and engineering entirely new approaches like this one is more expensive and not easily done by the community. So I guess it is the most efficient use of resources on both side.