LJ can get right on technical issues because it's backed by a corporation with significant capital. They have full-time tech people because they have money. Pots of it. They have money coming in from their corporate overlords, and money coming in from their userbase.

IJ is being run by a guy with a real full-time job. IJ isn't his job. It's what he does in his spare time. The number of people who've purchased accounts is pitifully small, compared to the total number of journals:

* Permanently Insane: 1601 (0.8%)
* Self-committed [paid]: 1240 (0.6%)

That's 2841 accounts who've paid. Out of a total of 237415 accounts.

But wait, what about extra userpics, you ask?

* Permanent Extra Userpics: 323 (0.2%)
* Insane Userpics: 40 (0.0%)

(Source: http://www.insanejournal.com/stats.bml, as of 11:30 p.m. EST June 12 2008.)

Now, as far as hiring someone goes, let's talk numbers: you know all those new site schemes we just got earlier this year? Worksafe and Dramatic? The volunteer who put those together would normally charge at least 2000 dollars for the amount of work that they took. And designers, as I understand it, charge less per hour than techs do.

If you're really into getting bugs fixed? Either volunteer to work on coding, or put out the word that coders are needed. Either that, or persuade large numbers of people to buy paid time (and renew that paid time) so that we have the pots of money it would take to hire support staff.

Final food for thought: I was on LJ back in the day before they introduced invite codes, when it was mostly just Brad running the place, and honestly? If you think IJ is creaky now, you should have been around then. Because IJ as it functions now is still doing pretty good compared to LJ before Brad sold out.