Third-party Drupal modules, like Drupal itself, are a community effort. I maintain several of these modules, and they are made better when helpful users submit patches to the modules' issue queues.
Putting together a new Drupal site, I had a puzzling moment when I noticed a new user's ID was number 15. This was mysterious because the site had only 4 users on it.
As a freelancer and Drupal specialist, I've worked with a number of website-building teams. It seems like each group reinvents solutions to the problem of sharing settings between multiple copies of Drupal.