Please communicate that to the National Science Foundation (and by extension, the electorate). We're hemorrhaging some of our best scientists for that reason. I may soon join them.
If I'm doing something for free, I don't mind doing it for free (obviously). If I'm doing something for money, I want to be paid my going rate; otherwise, either find someone else or sell me on just volunteering. I'd never charge $20/hr for software stuff -- it's basically $0/hr (which is most of my time, by choice) or market rate. It's actually the market rate billing that free me up to volunteer with open source projects in the first place.
I expect people will be paid fairly for their contributions. Are you in a position to be telling people what their time is worth? Or, possibly you're simply being a pessimist?
Define "senior". Senior citizen developers? Or you meant that title should mean stature? If you're still coding after being at it for >30 years then yes, you're worth that to help level up entire teams. But, yes, given the prevailing definition of senior, sure, they're worth nowhere near that.
$20/hr was a contract rate. Your 1/2 million presumably is a salary (base). Not the same thing. $20/hr is roughly equivalent to $20k salary. $200k salary is reasonable for a competent developer who can hop on adding features to Gimp.
In my reality no developer (even a sh*y one) makes $20k.
I don't think a developer spending one hour of their time could produce something worth $20 to GIMP. I'm not convinced you could even get a build and Dev environment even set up in that time for most major OSS projects, much less craft a good pull request and follow up to feedback.
