The market is weird and it's currently a zero sum game at best. DCC tools are in this weird little market that has extremely few paying (and mostly cash-strapped) customers, but the software itself is ridiculously complex. IIRC, Maya was estimated at ~5 mio. lines of code when version 1 or 2 was released, and it has gotten much, much more complex since. My understanding is that not all companies selling these programs are in the market for profit. If that goes away, it's likely that everybody loses.

Don't those people work on things because they want to and not because the community pays them?

There are plenty of high-caliber developers working on commercial products

At $1500/yearly subscription, 30,000 licenses is $45 million a year. Don't foreget about everyone who works at Autodesk that isn't a developer but stil involved with the product. And then there are plugin writers (are there commercial plugins for Blender?) and resellers etc

Ton is underestimating the market considerably, but he's still right in that it's a tiny market. But what he misses is the fact that Autodesk isn't developing its DCC tools for profit. They are for prestige, that is, supported by image marketing rather than sales. So the dev headcount is probably too low as well.