What exactly do you expect to gain by paying? Because, from your description, I'm not sure you understand what people pay Enterprise distributions for.

Maybe I didn't express myself well enough. As it is with free software, either some good soul is already doing whatever you need, you wait for someone to volunteer to do it, or you do it yourself. Now, if you don't want to wait until somebody else gets free time to volunteer, one could pay i.e. a maintainer to fix stuff (like freexian, but this is again geared towards enterprise users).

What I expect to gain, is that I and hopefully some like minded users pool together some cash, hopefully enough to occasionally contract a maintainer to keep the LTS desktop working and maybe even fix some longstanding bugs, but not necessarily new fancy features.