The comparison with the worlds of CakePHP or CodeIgniter is unfair. Those aren't client-facing technologies. If you're looking for a CakePHP person, you're probably a CakePHP person yourself. And someone else is funding your project.

WordPress is the first open-source CMS to break into the mainstream. A survey in April 2014 showed that a third of the US general internet population knew the WordPress name. And if they've been curious enough to Google it, they'll have found plenty of good things being said about WordPress.

A CakePHP-style sales pitch isn't going to work on these people. They wouldn't know where to find the list of contributors. They've never heard of Github. If they somehow found themselves looking at a Subversion repo, they'd assume the website had crashed.

Open source contributions will not, in and of themselves, lead to more work or better contracts. But they can form the basis of a good old-fashioned marketing message, which certainly can.

Clients won't hire you simply because your name is on the WordPress credits page. But they will hire you if you tell them your code has been reviewed by the smartest brains in the WordPress world, and was considered good enough to be incorporated within the core product, the same core product which powers tens of millions of sites worldwide, including (blah blah blah). They want proof? Look, there's your name on the credits page.

The public perception of WordPress is not a negative. Every other CMS platform is jealous of the overwhelmingly positive perception of WordPress among those who use it day in, day out, long after the developers have moved on.

If anyone's perception should change here, it's that of coders who think their code can or should sell itself.