In 15 years, I've read my fair share of "open source developer's lament", and when the projects mentioned are stuff like Requests or SQLObject I honestly don't understand. If you step back and try to look at these problems in a structured way, you can see that it always boil down to the following algo:

1. Is it a money problem? Then ask for money every time anyone asks for a piece of you (i.e. bug fixing, event patronage, whatever).

2. Is is a time problem? Then hire someone. If you can't afford it, it's a money problem: goto 1.

3. Is it a skills problem? Then hire someone. If you can't afford it, it's a money problem: goto 1.

I mean, requests alone is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. with all due respect to Kenneth and Ian, I find it hard to believe that it cannot pay one developer salary, even at Californian rates, unless they simply cannot be bothered to ask for money. Stuff like adding a "donate" button on the page looks lazy.

There are tons of ways to get money out of big corporations. Get a rotating-sponsorship deal where a company pays one salary for one year -- between Amazon, Google and Twitter (all heavy requests users, I'm sure), you already have three years of full-time development. They get quick bugfixes, you get a better life, win-win. These companies make billions with your code, I cannot believe they can't cough up some spare cash. I mean, look at the OpenBSD Foundation: they asked for some change to pay a month of server time, and they got Microsoft to dole out huge cash to port OpenSSH to Windows. Microsoft, FFS!