THe cinema industry is much smaller than photography, but the dialogue between companies and customers is much much richer in VFX.

Autodesk, foundry and Avid all have site licenses with their big players, and the product owners/managers will be on site talking to users to see what bugs/features are needed.

More over a lot of the big companies that buy this software also have their own R&D departments. So there is much cross pollination.

Also people will come to blackmagic and foundry with problems and ask for help (Ie rolling shutter reduction, anti-noise, optical flow, copy grade, etc etc)