For me the question for the larger web community boils down to this: we benefit as a whole when there are multiple high-quality browser engines but the implementors do not directly receive a significant share of those benefits (i.e. Opera implemented some things, helped the standards improve, and 99% of the web didn't benefit until the corresponding WebKit or Gecko implementation).

If we want that to change – particularly for ambitious projects like major security or parallelism improvements – it seems like there has to be some way to bring the scale back to the level where a small group can effectively enter the field.