It's better to have a billion dollar corp footing the bill for the massive amount of work it takes to maintain Android. If it comes to needing a fork so be it, but if they can be convinced (or strongarmed) to be more supportive of an open ecosystem and FOSS Android projects, everyone wins.
This comment nails it. There was an an article about how the FSF got funding for exactly one dude to work on free phone software https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45586339
That's great and all but it's just a drop in the bucket of the amount of work needed.
Systems with less maintainers require less maintenance because they are made in ways that require less maintenance. They also tend to be less good systems, but not in linear proportion to their reduced maintenance.