The problem is that there is only one maintainer. He's not interested or motivated by funding in the past.

In order for it to have a healthier existence, it needs more than one maintainer, and if another could be motivated with funding then that's something, but funding needs to be specifically directed to that person. There's no dlang foundation effort to try and find/fund maintainers for these essential projects.

The interesting catch that I reckon we can see with Visual Studio, is that it's usually industry professionals that are using it, and as such they are less likely to have bandwidth away from their work to work on that. It's not an ecosystem that lends to hobbyists so much; the overlap in the venn diagram between VS users and dlang hobbyists is small.

Ideally, a D company that uses VS should direct one of their staff to have some hours dedicated to tooling... but there aren't any such companies as I'm aware?