Disclaimer: you could have heard roughly the same statement from me as you did from Corion.

I do not feel that free software should lag behind in quality because whoever wrote it is not being paid.

Neither do I, but the fact remains that to support your software as an OSS developer, you need all of

• time
• motivation
• skills
• organization

(with "organization" I meant that she must not forget about the bug, how to reproduce it etc.)

I do love free software, but I wouldn't go as far as making it the top priority in my live - which means that any of these points may suffer from "real life".

So I would concur with Corion that if I were to guarantee that nothing gets in my way of fixing bugs, I'd have to promote the priority of the software, for example by making it my job - ie getting paid for.

I have my ideals, but that doesn't mean that I have to ignore reality.