Funding tools vs Funding results: This is a no-brainer. If the devs don't have the tools, then we'll have far less results and they will cost a lot more.
Just do the math: the cheapest reasonable programmers you can find will cost you more than $1K USD per month. If they use Claude Code, for $200/month, it's like paying $1200 for $5000 worth of programmers. And that's assuming the cheapest programmer you could find, and you'll spend a lot of time trying to find a good programmer that would even work that cheap.
As to what will grow the ecosystem, there's two methods, it's not rocket science either: 1) provide more useful functionality (e.g. develop more software) and 2) market it better. At this particular time, I think method 1 is more easy to approach than 2.
RE: Hive Dev Fund Proposal - Pilot (P1)