I don’t see this as a shortcoming of FOSS in general. Many projects perform general fundraising and the project leaders/foundation decides how to spend the funds (e.g. development of specific features, bug fixing / bug bounties, etc.). Several times recently @ced has proposed a feature to the community and asked for financial contributions to compensate development. A non-developer could act as a middle-person, propose a feature and ask for community members to pledge financial support or quote the development.
Treat this with appropriate skepticism. Similar to asking a sales person what product features are important, you find out what is immediately important to close a sale, but not much about long-term strategy.