Grease Pencil was mainly developed by Antonio Vazquez and main feedback was done by Daniel Martinez Lara and Matias Mendiola. Most of Grease Pencil development occurred during 2.8 and 2.9 series.
But I think that during production of the open movie Hero, they were financed.
Yiming Wu, who is working on Lineart modifier, was paid through GSOCs.
Clément Foucault worked during years on its PBR viewport branch, before being employed to work on EEVEE, inspired by that work. But EEVEE is a different project.
And currently, Clément is working on EEVEE next. He is not free for anything else, either
Julian Eisel did most of the work on Asset Browser and was helped by Jereoen, Bastien and Sybren.
Sybren who was in charge of pose library part. Asset Browser was a very old target,with a design initiated by Andrea Weikert for 2.5 project. Julian is also in charge of VR stuff.
Geometry Nodes are supervised by Jacques Lucke (animation nodes developer).
Because it is a massive task. Hans Goodey (who started as GSOC student on Bevel modifier) was also allocated to it.
And yes, Cycles X is fruit of work of Brecht and Sergey.
So, a developer generally does a lot of work on its own or as a GSOC student. Often, he is integrated to the team to continue during months. Often, he goes back to his life and is continuing as a volunteer. Sometimes, he is staying for decades. And there are developers that are employed by same cycle as feature is developed.
Currently, best sum-up of who is paid to work on what seems to be grants page.
In fact, with 7 experienced developers assigned to Core and 5 developers assigned to task triaging to feed them and 2 coordinators. Clearly, the priority of such organization is to solidify Blender.
But bugfixes are not generating a lot of hype.
auf Twitter: „“We believe in empowering artists so we are cutting off all future updates from folks who spent $$$ for a perpetual licences, and instead trying to woo them on a 50% discount on a $500/yr subscription” https://t.co/LnNzZ597ki“ / Twitter
