> My first reaction when I heard about the worker proposal was enthusiasm.

I was exactly there.

When I first read about the SPS I thought „awesome, that’s the right thing to do“ but then immediately focused on the question of how to bring in the needed funds rather than questioning its necessity as a whole.

You are raising valid points. I’m not so sure anymore about the merits of funding proposals upfront to their implementation. It may even prevent devs from first probing the market for actual demand and could thus  lead to the preservation of otherwise non-viable initiatives.

Still, maybe there is a category of projects or rather jobs, like code maintenance, debugging, incremental improvements etc. for which a salary would help to speed things up to all our benefit. I need to think more about this. Thanks for triggering that!