Koichi Sasada first contributed Ruby 1.9 VM(YARV) & now new GC algo. Its amazing that how much big dent an single person can make to a language/ecosystem used by millions around the world #Respect.
It's even easier to see with http://contributors.rubyonrails.org/ :
The top 2 people have 4,000 vs 3,000 commits, 1/3rd more than the 3rd person.
3rd and 4th have 3,000 vs 2,000, 1/2 more than the fifth.
6th has half of the commits that 4th does.
I myself only started working on Rails about a year ago, and got 192 commits in that time. That places me at #33 overall, out of 1735.
-------------------------------
It's also interesting to look at numbers for releases, too. Here's Rails 4, for example: http://contributors.rubyonrails.org/edge/contributors
Same thing, smaller scale.
-------------------------------
I'm not saying this invalidates your point in any way, just that it's the same for almost all projects; precious few people do much of the work that we rely on every day.