Satirik wrote: a problem for what ?
Problem for a project which is maintained by a single person is that it removes discussion of the features, there is no fast feedback on the commits, and there is no generalised repository from which the builds are made, and barely anyone is watching the code.
In short : you can just compile whatever you want and feed it to us through auto update.
Why its less likely to happen with the team? Well, because:
First is that you can only really do that once, and if you do, the rest of the team kicks you out, project continues, the developer suffers, not the project.
Second, each person does not get to say what they want on their own, its a collective decision, which, most of the time, excludes anomalous behaviour such as "ohlol lets put this thing so that its going to crash for that guy".
TASC is a great example of the drawback of having a single developer for the project. The case has happened, but the developer is still there, and has received no retaliation whatsoever. If, in the future, he would decide that its all over for him with spring, he can plant any payload he wants into TASC, not just a crashbug for a user.
Edit: now re-reading the thread and the auch's answer, I realise that I misinterpreted your question, whatever I said above still holds true in my opinion, as to answer your question, in the end, the users suffer, even if they dont realise that.