It's hard to have more than 2 developers working on the core of something. Development is a very non-concurrent activity. Speaking from experience, when there'

It's hard to have more than 2 developers working on the core of something. Development is a very non-concurrent activity. Speaking from experience, when there's multiple people trying to take over the same bit, they only create conflicting changes all over the place and deadlock the project. It's worse than if no work was not done. Now somebody needs to take the lead and remerge things manually and discard what cannot be merged. Regarding maintenance, the later army of maintainers is typically a bunch of contractors mostly sitting idle billing for time. The size of the maintenance team has little correlation to the workload.