Bitshares was launched a little over a year ago with a price of roughly $0.01/bts. The current price is about $0.007/bts. While devs have not made much money over the past year, shareholders have lost money. The whole premise to begin with was for devs to produce more value than they take and by the above metric, that hasn't worked out so well. So who is to say that GS would hire a dev team that has lost value for its shareholders over the past year? Sometimes you have to look at it from a shareholders perspective also, not just a devs perspective.
Now I absolutely don't believe that devs have not produced value over the past year. Markets can often be irrational and the entire crypto industry has been mired in a bear market over the past year. Also, re-engineering the entire global financial system is a major undertaking with much trial and error along the way. Shareholders' only recourse is to attempt to hire a new dev team or allocate their capital elsewhere, which many have done.
IMO, this project Simply will not succeed without the current dev team. We are all in this together. Devs need shareholders and shareholders need devs. The new design may just be the ticket to significantly reward both shareholders and devs. In fact, I am confident that at some point, top talent from GS will be flocking to bitshares to be a part of our team, and it may happen sooner than we all think. We have already seen many defectors from the legacy financial system move into crypto, and many more are sure to follow. Besides, for GS to develop a system to compete against bitshares, they would either have to create a centralized system, which they already have, or clone bitshares and maybe add in a few tweaks. In other words, GS can't compete, they can only join the crypto space if they want to survive the upcoming revolution.