The thing is, or was, that those who did know about programming and developing have plenty of their own ideas but only so much time in one life. The reason it reminds me of it, is that you too have nothing to bring to the table that the breeder doesn't have already. The solution, for you, is throwing money at it. Nothing wrong with hiring someone else to do the manual labor or hire someone's for his/her experience and expertise.
An experienced breeder could easily market and sell a strain through already established contacts. Same as that iphone developer who can release his own app and doesn't need your ideas or name to make money. You're not just paying for the time, if you want to own the strain, basically buying exclusive rights to sell it, and since you specifically said "stable" (which most named crosses/strains today aren't), then yeah tens of thousands isn't that much.
An easy example. Let's say you want your own haze variety. You (or the breeder) knows a good haze strain from which one parent can be selected, and you know a strain with a certain taste you want to have breed into that strain. If both strains are stable to begin with the breeder still needs to grow out hundreds of plants (which costs space, time, electricity..., and manual labor) and will have to do at the very least 4 or 5 generations, taking a year roughly, not including the initial parents selection. And that's when everything goes perfect, which in reality is rarely the case. And that's when you only want 'a' trait in an already stable strain. If you want your own sativa-indica hybrid based on a landrace it'll take a 'tad' longer...