Such is the life of a software consumer. I mean, other than getting total custom work that has some way of being future proof -- which I assume would cost a lot of money -- I don't see any other way around the current reality that is the uncertainty of software development. You can't even rely on IPS to continue supporting their products.
I think one of the reasons developers aren't motivated is the customers -- yes there are plenty of people willing to spend money but do all of those people also contribute in a substantial way to these forums? Not really. What do developers face on here? A lot of fly-by customers who often make ignorant remarks in the midst of petulant complaints, mixed in with a number of enthusiastic but often incomprehensible and impatient customers who fail to understand certain basic facts about software development and how to give feedback... all along side IPS who brought a brand new codebase without a set of top class development tools to go with it, as well as failing to supply clear and user friendly communication to non-developers about some of the realities of developing for IPS that the average person might not be aware of.
Also, on top of all that, when the third-party devs do go ahead and put even more work into supporting their customers with their own sites where they can improve things in a way that is impossible on this site... what happens? They get customers blaming them rather than IPS for the currently broken state of the relationships between IPS, devs, and customers.
There are clearly still good people in the IPS community from all parts but between continued development here and stable income from actual jobs (I recall RAW recently said he has two jobs at the moment), I think I'd honestly go elsewhere.