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In a way I agree with you, but on the other hand I use GIMP all the time and think it's fantastic, so I might be willing to donate. Also, in principle GEGL has much more wide utility than just as a filter stack for GIMP -- it's a pretty general-purpose image processing library.

I don't follow Gimp development. Could you be more specific?

Maybe funding will allow them to direct attention more towards desired features - whilst generally I gather OS contributors prefer to work on features that interest them rather than necessarily the ones the community en masse prefer.

Donations might also free developers time to enable GSoC projects to be merged in, if indeed this is why it hasn't happened yet.