I looked at the 6 or so different sidechains being built and asked myself "are any of these offering what ETH, BnB and countless other chains that are attracting millions and millions of dollars volume daily doing?"..
As far as I know no one was making a side chain that was going to be compatible with all existing popular smart contract code and also use HIVE as it's utility currency.
If a bunch of people are building side chains to add functionality to HIVE that is great, will certainly try to build interfaces with all of them to support the community and be inclusive.
For Devs on board officially it's lapingvino and myself although a few of the other guys have expressed some interest in helping. Even if it's just small things like helping run nodes on testnet or auditing code when it gets pushed will help out immensely.
Also lol, The usage of the word simply in that context is hella sarcastic. Obviously if it was simple someone would have done it 3 years ago. Quite confident though that development of this chain will result in a net positive for the community as a whole.
The convergence idea is cool, but who's project to focus on?
If the entire developer community focused on one project and smashed it out you figure development cycles would take weeks instead of months? It would be cool to have all the devs working together on projects to turbocharge things, but to overcome the different schools of thought and personality quarrels within our group may take a truly worthy cause or a time of incredible chaos. If you want to work on this sidechain you are welcome to. The helping eachother idea is neat but most of us developer types seem to stick to ourselves. :/ Been lucky to have a few developers express interest in aiding this project along.
Personally I'm focused on building this as a means of decentralizing my lending contracts in v2.0 of Hive.Loans.
Sadly haven't got time for atleast the next 3 or so months to dive into other peoples sidechains here on HIVE in any serious fashion.