Since my last post it seems fair to say that Qgis is like a lot of open source projects a largely community effort. There may be some people that are paid but in reality a lot of contributions are voluntary. I shouldn't be too demanding with issues because they are working to a deadline at the moment to produce the 3.0 release.
I have built a Debian VM to the latest development release 1caaa2e and will be looking at what my project need migrated to work with it.
