I'm surprised Bitcoin has as many devs as it does.
I'm not. In addition to the two developers who are paid by the Bitcoin Foundation and the many volunteers, aren't there others who are paid by BitPay and other companies that have an interest in seeing Bitcoin succeed?
How many client downloads are we up to now, 5-10 million? VLC media player has well over a billion downloads. For just a movie player that's pretty impressive because there are dozens of different movie players. Bitcoin is still just a newborn infant.
They don't compare, at this point Bitcoin is still in its infancy. While it doesn't currently have mass adoption like VLC media player, it does attract people who are far more able and willing to contribute code (to Bitcoin Core or to other related projects) than your average person who simply wants to watch a movie would be.
I wouldn't exactly call VLC "just" a movie player either. It may be the best media player I've ever used and it's definitely the best cross-platform media player I've ever used, working almost identically on Windows, Mac and Linux. It's one of the first things I install on any computer I own even if I don't plan to use that computer primarily for movies or music.
I guess I should have said as young as bitcoin is development is funded. It has paid devs that should be killing themselves improving it. I said Bitcoin was still an infant
but in another six years I expect it to be as least where vlc was at in the early 2000s with a couple hundred volunteers, 7-8 thousand commits and a half billion downloads. If it's not something is wrong with the idea. I chose vlc for comparison because, like Bitcoin, it's a great project whose time has come.