Thank you for making this post and describing your proposal. Ned's post earlier wasn't exactly clear...or perhaps I was just distracted when reading it.
Whether or not your team does this, I think the best thing for the community is for development moving forward to incorporate a more open source community driven mentality. While Steem and Condenser and the majority of other projects involving Steem are open source...they're really rather closed considering. Most open source projects have forums and timelines and such. On Steem, they rarely even talk about the development. There are a TON of developers here. They can help. They could greatly improve Steem and reduce timelines for development. Right now they're just supposed to fork the code and push any changes they have I guess?
If Steem views this as financially beneficial to free their devs from other things, then they should do it. But...I hope if you have any devs with open source experience, that they help get the community involved as well.