I more or less got this started. Frankly, I was thinking of CubeCart, where they have an active community of modders and template designers. They also have a paid version, which is an entirely different product than the free version.
I was not thinking of the paid version, simply the free version and comparing it to some other freebies, such as OSC and Zen, as well as PrestaShop. OSC and Zen have tons of free "contributions", but some have been modded and modded with several different contributors and there seems to be little concern of one mod interfering with another.
With CC, there seems to be a more close knit community, with different modders even mentioning that their mod may not work if someone elses' xzy mod is installed. And while there are many free, there are more that are not. With OSC / Zen it seems they are all totally free. And Presta seems to have a mixture. (I know little about Presta, I've installed every release and find it is going in the wrong direction for me.)
Full time living? I guess that depends on how well he wants to live. I am not a coder. If I had to write just one line in anything except HTML to live another day, my wife would be a widow tomorrow. So, how much time is involved, I have no idea. Exactly how you make money off a free product, again, I have no idea. Well, I have a few.
I started this because Daniel was saying it was hardly worth his while doing small jobs for people, so my true concern was to get it to where he was seeing something for his efforts. Personally, I have looked at easily half a hundred shopping cart demos in the last six of eight months and I can say I know of zero working mall / multi-store free scripts. I'd suggest making that a $100 or so per install license. Most are $300 or more.
There may be other versions that could be sold. There are few scripts that will handle sales of games codes. Some will do it automatically after a PayPal payment, but lack a buyer confirmation step between purchase with a possibly stolen account login and online delivery. Having a built in phone call verification would make for a nice $100 script for someone wanting to sell codes.
There are other variations that could also be sold, while still maintaining the free base cart. For sale could be a help desk module, an "included" forum, an automated sequential autoresponder, etc.
Not for everyone, but there are people looking for each. I know, they pay me to search them out and install them. I could sell several games key codes packages right now.
Is this going to happen tomorrow, certainly not. Maybe never. About the least involved in this thread is Daniel himself. He may want nothing to do with any of it.
As for me, I'd be happy with a stable 1.4.x