I have no doubt that this is your experience (for which there might be many causes - my email is in profile unlike yours ;), but there are also extremely successful examples like the ones I and others have posted. They stand out not because they succeeded, but because they're the few who tried -- and succeeded spectacularly quickly, almost accidentally.

Working in the enterprise/financial world, I can tell you that boatloads of cash get wasted on the most absurd items, so there must be ways to funnel some of this to the right places. Even VC-backed "lean" startups would/should rate publicity "in the right places" more than a lot of other things, let alone direct benefits from actual productivity gains. For example, I often don't know whom awesome_oss_developer works for; if I did, I would be inclined to rate their products and services way higher, and would probably want to work for them more. Every single OSS release from major projects should carry a sponsor highlighted in README and release notes. Advertising somehow pays for billion-dollar companies in the real world, but the same companies don't rate it enough to sustain their own infrastructure?

I'm not doubting that reality is dire, what I'm doubting is the effort placed on changing it. There are many elements of the engineering culture dominant in OSS that are just not right from a commercial perspective and could/should be fixed with brutal honesty.