Something I've left out of this series is the fact that for the past five years, all of my paying jobs have been to work on free software. These days I look at work as an opportunity to let someone, who cares a lot about some improvement, expose me to new things and shift my priorities a bit and get me pointed in a subtly different direction. It happened with debconf and d-i at VA, with LSB stuff thanks to HP, with security and end-user stuff at SLX, and I can feel it happening with embedded Debian at ADS.
(Incidentially, I don't know why I only work for organisations with acronym for names these days.)
The best of these priority shifts are the ones that don't stop being a priority even after the job ends. And those also seem to be the ones that lead on to new jobs. The downsides to working this way include sometimes having to pass up a neat job, or only participate in something half of the time, because to do otherwise would demand too much time that I've allocated to projects started in previous jobs.
Letting go of old projects is, at least for me, a problem that seems likely to get more serious the longer I'm involved in free software. It's a lot better than the alternatives in the prioprietary software world though.