One thing which helps Blender is that its target audience is better equipped to write code, or at least think about code enough to connect with the "project" si

One thing which helps Blender is that its target audience is better equipped to write code, or at least think about code enough to connect with the "project" side of open source software. That doesn't mean Blender users need to do that to be productive, but it definitely gives actual users a stronger voice. I find free software generally doesn't work as well when there's a hard split between the developers and the users, unless those developers are incredibly empathetic, clever, and well funded. (Or just fully aware of the problem they're solving, but it's hard to find a large sample of people that can write a really good vector graphic editor, have a clue about UI design, and are also keenly aware of the problems people deal with when they're drawing a graphic novel). You can see that process working well with Blender's open movie projects (https://www.blender.org/about/projects/ https://www.blender.org/about/projects/). I haven't paid attention to them recently, but in the past they have been structured around building some new feature in Blender, such as improving the video editor and motion tracking experience (Tears of Steel), or rendering and sculpting (Sintel).