- The company was being overly secretive about the tech behind the hardware, and as a result was exposing very little useful stuff in the API.
- There is something inherently dissatisfying about waving your hands in thin air to control something. The lack of any haptic feedback and no way to ascertain the vision frustum of the device made it very uncomfortable to use.
- Like a lot of startups, Leap Motion wanted to become a platform instead of being a hardware company. This made using it a total pain, having to go through their app store to accomplish even basic tasks. This also leads to a rather disingenuous customer-company relationship, as the company is not interested in just selling you their hardware, but also wants to control the way you use the hardware.
The entire thing would be far more appealing and hackable if they opened up their API and allowed the developer to access the raw data - depthmaps, point clouds, motion vectors - whatever's available internally. Sadly, this does not seem to be happening.