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The manufacturers may be hiring hackers to work on "clean" firmware. Another possibility is that the manufacturers are adopting the pirate code (just taking it, without hiring the hackers) to fix issues, but leaving out the decryption routines.
I don't think that there is any doubt the pirates are writing the firmware for the manufacturers, although I guess there is the question of whether they were employees first, and then did the pirate stuff on their own time, or if the pirates did their work on their own, and are selling it to the manufacturers.
But the factory firmware always seems to come out first on the hacker sites, long before ever showing up on the Coolsat site, and they come out using the same numbering system that the files have when they come out on Coolsat, and the files are identical.
There was an interesting thread on one of the now defunct hacker sites, which described a nasty argument between Coolsat and a couple pirate firmware writers. Perhaps that had something to do with why it's been so long since a new factory firmware version came out at Coolsat. There have been 2 or 3 new versions of "factory" firmware out on the hacker sites since the previous 1444A version that hit the Coolsat site back in September.
Anyway, for years, I have stayed away from those pirate sites, but once I got this Coolsat, it very quickly became obvious that in order to get this receiver to do what it's supposed to do, that we could NOT depend upon Coolsat alone, that we were dependent upon the hackers for correction of bugs, and by bugs, I'm talking serious deficiencies. My first 8100's PVR function didn't work at all with original firmware, and my second one rebooted continually, until I found a version of hacker firmware that fixed the problem, so basically without the hacker support, my 2 receivers wouldn't work at all.