I've always thought it would be an exciting development if enough OSS developers could be paid to do their work, à la Canonical or some of the other places that do that.

The trouble with OSS is that most developers are working on it part-time... if more projects had dedicated teams of individuals, I think we'd see faster iterations of better quality. For instance, desktop linux is moving there pretty quick nowadays, but it still takes a lot of time and energy and coordination to form a product as cohesive as some proprietary software (e.g. Apple).