That is a rate of development that bests most paid teams that I know of.
I am very impressed. How do you manage so much commitment for an open source project?
I suspect most serious / active open source projects have a number of paid for developers like that. TBH, they need it, if their scale is beyond a small library / utility.
Hash reversing as a problem having property #2, virtually guarantees that the landscape of hash-reversing software would look like an oligopoly, because people would use the tools with the most algorithms, and so contribute to those, and so “the rich get richer.”
But hashcat having property #1 means that there’s no political reason (e.g. your enterprise wanting to ship something with your own branded GUI on it) to be unable to use hashcat, and so no reason for anyone to create their own new full-stack hash reversing system, when hashcat already exists to be used within such software.
Effectively, these properties are the same thing that made ffmpeg the “winner” in its own space, as discussed yesterday (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23540704).
The reason this is MIT and not GPL makes this project all sorts of bad. MIT has its places and I have several personal open projects under it, but I can't imagine a case where society would be better by a company having closed hash cracks built on top of open source work.
Obviously non ethical hackers can get paid non ethically. Anyone can get paid non-ethically after all. It's a fact that's so trivial it's useless if you just take it for its factual content. What makes it interesting is the implication that people use hashcat for unethical (and/or illegal) activities and use the proceeds from that to pay for their time improving hashcat. The comment doesn't state that, but it's what we are all thinking when reading it.
The clear implication that actually answers the question, that these non ethical hackers are responsible for the commitment to the project, is an unsubstantiated claim.