I used piston.
There were issues, but not because of piston.
More recently, in an attempt to complete the same work (no joke like 2 weeks ago) myself and @l0k1 hit troubles caused by steemd with piston. Single-quotes in json, eh....?
Nice, steemd, nice.
Oh, and guess what dude, no fucking way I'm going to use a fake identity to contribute to Stinc's repositories.
Well you know what Fuzzy wants. If it was me, I'd secretly code something up over the coming months, and deliver it anyway..
(Especially as piston gets better, and so does steemd)
If I was this knee deep, and it bugged me. I'd just do it. If he didn't want to take it after it ran... well.. I still gave him a workable product in the end. That's the only thing that would make me feel better.
Each and everyday people are doing amazing things... just look at esteem. The guy is doing all of that... unpaid... luckily he can do it without money.
You'll find yourself with spare time here and there. Make it a mission. Fuzzy will say don't bother. But if you showed him a sexy website that actually works, with the specs that he wanted..
Time could create some healing and this will end nicely.
I have to qualify that it was my error with the incorrect JSON output, by using a python-language-parser.
Also, steemd is a mess of spaghetti and cryptic and complex c++. They may have finally open sourced the code, but i doubt anyone wants to take on the burden of management. It was designed as a monolithic block, as is often the case in hurried code development whipped by corporate bosses.
In fact, I was rather shocked to learn that in the early days after Golos started up, that golos and steem nodes were broadcasting invalid transactions to each other. This is a nightmare of bad programming practises.
They didn't need to open source it. Nobody wants this shit. They need to deliver on the promise of modularising it and turning it into a fabric instead of a monolithic chain.