> I think the problem that developers may feel is that they want to earn more money for being a better developer, but not nessicarily accept more responsibility or spend less time developing code.

Well the problem is some people don't get there is a limit of how much impact and additional revenue you can create for the company by writing better/more code. And that would serve as a basis for paying you more.

The thing is a guy helping out via mentoring 10 other people or recruiting better talent will create much more impact on how the company functions than if he wrote 2x better code or 2x faster. There is simply in almost all engineering effort a hard limit of how much a single person can contribute.