There's a third passion--the passion of the audience for a good story. Now typically the passion of the audience is more closely aligned to the passion of the producers / money makers than to the passion of the writer. That's natural, because the producers / bean-counters are attuned to the passion of a mass (not niche) audience. The immediate audience of the writer is the writer, so there's no challenge there.

My take (based on intuition rather than experience): if a writer is impassioned to tell a story outside the parameters of a commercial narrative, then that writer has to work many times harder to translate that personal story into a script that will involve the ordinary reader / viewer. And even then, the odds will favor the conventional story over the innovator (most of the independent breakout stories are at bottom quite normal, e.g. Little Miss Sunshine or Bridesmaids). The mavericks (e.g. Memento or Eternal Sunshine or Mulholland Drive) are extremely well-crafted, often more so than their more popular competitors.