As a professional freelance programmer and a plugin dev I figured I would weigh in on this. As to hiring freelancers to advance project completion, that is a massively double edged sword. First off most freelancers aren't going to be familiar with the Minecraft community or how to create plugins for it. Yes, they could learn the API's that are needed but that is generally expensive and time consuming. Not only that, if they don't play Minecraft already, they aren't going to know how to test what they are developing or even have a way to test it. This means that freelancers would have to be found that have the knowledge needed, and that is an extremely small subgroup.
Next comes the pricing of freelancers. We are an expensive group. Add in development time on top of that. Most freelancers work on multiple projects & contracts at the same time. Which one gets priority depends on what the client is paying balanced by the deadline. The more you pay, the more priority that the project gets to get it done closer to deadline and the higher quality the work is.
To use me as an example, I am friendly with Kainzo and thus wouldn't charge him full price. Even still, he is looking at $1000+ to get me to create a single plugin, provided it is a simple plugin and could be completed within a week. If this was just some random person that I didn't know and I was charging my full price, depending on the complexity of what they wanted and when they wanted it by (which is usually immediately because people have no concept of development timetables or accurate deadlining) you are looking at $2000-$5000. And that is for one single plugin that takes me anywhere from 40-60 hours to make including testing, documentation, and development. That doesn't even include the time spent on project setup, paperwork, or design.
Currently there isn't much that can be done to reduce lag. What can be done is being worked on and explored, but the limitation lays majorly with the server software itself, that being the minecraft server. I'm sure
Kainzo is doing everything he can to try to mitigate the problem and find solutions. He has some of the best programmers in the community "working" for him and on his team. Have faith that they play the game also and hate lag just as much as everyone else does.
