I'm a huge fan of antirez in particular for this. So many other devs would have shrugged off the occasional latency as acceptable, or a poor measure of true performance, or blamed it on nebulous EC2 performance issues. Which happened, to a greater or less extent. But three blog posts later he's still digging in to the root causes and has eventually (through no small effort) come up with the cause, and a fix.

Open source is good. Its individuals like antirez who make it great.