Well, the situation is even worst than I actually though, based on development rate...
According to:
http://www.freepascal.org/aboutus.var (no page refresh date)
http://wiki.freepascal.org/Developer_pages ( last modified 22 January 2016, at 22:28)
I have manage to count 8 members for FPC. And 17 active members for Lazarus, among only 7 older members I can remember from early 2006.
In bug trackers I can see few other people with developer status not listed here... but all in all less than 30 members for such a huge project is indeed devastated fact...
On this forum I can see more than 100 people with 400+ and more than 30 over 1000 messages. Is there a qualified future members for development team among them? Actually, I doubt anyone is ready or have a time to read 1000s to millions lines of code in order to become active developer..
Let assume other members of the forum are just students have Pascal classes only as introduction in OOP, enthusiasts and skilled Delphi programmers have no time to involve deeply in FPC/Lazarus development, focused on their own projects.
I can see also some people donate their own work here (as pointed in this thread)...
Lazarus need quite a lot of work to fix large amount of bugs as well as FPC. Even the most of work for both is done until 2013, any change (bug fixing, improvement or new feature) may lead from minor to serious regression - actually happens all the time.
At end, no matter anyone being optimistic future is not good at all. Such huge projects should have at least 100-300 active developers wiling to spend few hours a week only.
Being simply realistic based on facts, not underestimating nor overestimating any effort of 20-25 years of development nor in the future, current situation is not quite good and reflecting that to the near future things does not look promising....
That is all.