Does the core blockchain developers do all the work?

[Accardo]

I looked into the two types of Blockchain developers today and it seemed to me that they are behind the scene of the blockchain software developers.

Understood they are in charge of the blockchain protocol
Consensus protocol
Security patterns for network
Design of the network architecture
Supervision of the entire network.

With all the above responsibilities they are to me the heroes of blockchain development. And the software developers are like polishers of the core developers' work. 

Is it impossible for a core blockchain developers to do the work of a software developer? With all the knowledge of coding, they already know.

[ranochigo]

Bitcoin Core is technically the "official" reference client whereby all the protocol rules are defined on there. The project itself is open source and everyone can contribute to the project if they want and have the technical competency. I believe most "Bitcoin Developers" or the ones that are contributing actively are working in the field that's related to computing.

So the entire project is hosted on github[1] and there are repository maintainers to merge pull requests and someone in charge to merge to create new release candidates and it's stable release. Most of the changes comes from pull requests[2] whereby everyone discusses about the feasibility and the rationale behind the change in the code. They can comment to support the pull request or to state that they have reviewed the code. Afterwhich, the pull requests could potentially be merged by the repository maintainer.

You can also fork the client yourself to create your own version of Bitcoin, which makes it essentially an alt coin.

[1] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin
[2] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pulls