This is not exactly true, one hour of reviewing code doesn't equals one hour of producing code in terms of productivity.
Unless the guy who wrote the code did an awful job that makes it super hard to read. You can expect the one hour of reviewing to produce much more than the one hour of coding because he is reviewing like 2-10 hours of code in that one hour.
And it's not even about reviewing code, it's about the community making changes and then having their PR shut down because steemit inc doesn't agree with them. I would have contributed to condenser or steem core myself but I know I'll never do that because there is a moderate to high chance that I'll be wasting my time. And basically all of the devs that I know on steem have the same mindset. We dont want to work on steemit inc owned repositories because history has proven that it's a waste of time and we be better off working on other things.
" make the site better, or review code that might make the site better." => This is the core issue. You guys believe that you can carry all the weight by yourselves and do all the changes because you believe that your time is worth more than everyone elses because you are better than everyone else.
And this breeds this current situation where everyone is just like "well steemit inc will do it"
And this is what happens : Even though you have a lot of knowledge about your own product (obviously) you can't be everywhere at once. A simple example is canonical links. A feature that is vital for a front end (especially steemit.com that's the biggest) to have a healty ecosystem of dapps and yet despite multiple calls to steemit inc to do it we had to wait two years for a community dev to finally do it.
RE: Steemit’s New Direction