Cost reduction is great, but you can work on multiple things at once. It seems to be taking them an unusually large amount of time to split out the wallet from the Condenser application let alone other things, which signals to me a couple of things:
- The development team is lacking needed resources
- There might be a disparity between skill level, during downsizing they might have let go more experienced (by proxy, more expensive) developers which meant they were left with only a few developers familiar with the more intricate underlying pieces. This means that there are probably pieces of the Steem architecture that realistically, only one or two developers can change
- The Condenser app is messy, while it is broken up into individual components, it is still tightly coupled and difficult to work with. This seems to be a problem that many React applications share once they go beyond a few components
I think STINC is still in its infancy. From the outset anyone who can see things holistically, if Steemit had delivered on their promise of SMT's, they wouldn't have needed to experiment with advertisements. I can almost guarantee that they would make more than enough revenue from charging fees associated with the creation of a new token.
A great example of the demand is the work @aggroed and his team have done with @steem-eng which just launched its new DEX yesterday. Quite a few tokens have been created already, and while it is a sidechain, it delivers on the promise of creating your own token and it serves most use-cases. They're working on a consensus layer which will only put it further ahead.
The real problem here is: STINC is blind to their own community. There are so many capable and experienced developers who want to help Steem grow. Steemit Inc has more than enough liquid Steem to spend a few hundred thousand to fund community contribution and grow the blockchain. If Steemit let the community handle SMT's with financial incentives, they would probably be done by now.
Thanks for stating some insightful and valid thoughts. I note that @steemalliance is addressing your last point, perhaps differently than you'd recommend, but it is being undertaken.
Steem Engine is pretty cool.
Going forward, the number of dapps is going to increase at unknown, but probably accelerating rates, and poorly tuned nodes would have multiplied that burden obscenely.
It's impossible to state fees from SMTs would be able to provide more substantial funding, as there is practically no experience with such a product. Like Steem, SMTs are novel technology, and difficult to accurately price, or analyze for costs and benefits.
Most of us are convinced (I am) that SMTs are gonna be homerun financially, but if they come out flawed, they're gonna be a nightmare instead. I am encouraged that Stinc hasn't just rushed something out and started flailing away at bugs, flaws, and disappointment, as @drugwars has, for example.
I'm presently almost convinced that in the long run decreasing the expense of running nodes and encouraging dapps to run their own may actually be more critical to the success of Steem than SMTs.
Nodes are the key to decentralization, and if costs can continue to come down while computer capacity continues to increase, eventually extremely robust decentralization will be able to protect the blockchain from threats regardless of their source.
Nothing is more important than security from existential threat.
Lastly, I cannot judge your competence, but things are not always just what they seem to be, and it is often useful to consider the quality of optics with which one regards things. There may be extremely important reasons for specific undertakings being priority over others, and we just can't know without more information than is availed us.
Thanks!