If all the skilled developers leave, device dies. That should be taken into account inside the community and by the people "running things". The more you contribute, the more you can say how things should be done, and where to go.

I see potential in N900 to become something similar to what Amiga was back in the day. Developers squeezed every last bit of the horsepower out of the very outdated hardware and it was a closed platform. It's been way over 20 years and the community as well as hardware is still around and active. Whole OS (and ROM) now have open source alternative with ports to another architectures (AROS) and there are modern hardware replicas available today. That is something I see as a very respectable work and end result from people around the never dying machine. I realize this is not relevant in this case, but it is a fine example what could be done. So, if we keep together, maybe we can achieve something similar.