Well, nothing's wrong with paying someone to do something, except... well, you're not really doing that.

Yes, I don't fix cars either and I don't miss it.

You and a bunch of other people are throwing money into a pile and hoping other people will notice it when the pile gets big enough. Not a bad system, really,

You misunderstood the model. It's not about collecting the money and giving to the first volunteer, it's the other way around. Someone comes up with a proposal which he wants to do and he has to be persuasive enough, show his credentials and stuff if he wants people to fund his proposal.

Once you put a price on something, I think you'll find that fewer people are actually willing to do the work

The problem is these are tasks which people apparently can't do in their freetime, because they involve too much work, so it's not like we have an army of volunteers who want to do it and we spoil their enthusiasm with money.

This model is intended for developes who want to work on Emacs, but they can't work on these difficult features, because they have to earn money and they rather spend their free time with their famiiies. But if we say one can be paid while working on this, so he can work on it all day then it's an opportunity for him to get paid to do what likes and an opportunity for users to finally get their favourite feature implemented.