I feel a bit sad that I was unable to put in the work to bring Electrino forward. There was a lot of interest, but I just couldn't find any more extra time between existing paying work and family. As you say, Electrino is a multi-year commitment because of the sheer number of APIs needed to support the apps that are already out there.
I made Termipal because I found myself writing a bunch of crappy shell scripts for various tasks, and having real UI with dropdowns and buttons made the scripts much more usable.
I used to be a native dev (from when native meant desktop OS :P) and switched to web apps just for UI development convenience, then node-webkit came. I still use both nw.js and Electron (though I admit I kinda like nw.js more, IPC is a PITA) but, even though I love the development experience, I absolutely hate the end user experience.
Can you elaborate on why is Electrino a multi-year commitment? I guess I can see why if you meant Electrino as a drop-in replacement of Electron. Did you consider scaling down the features a bit? Just bundle a native webview + Node.js, add some kind of IPC and let userland do the rest.
Would this be achievable or am I missing something that makes it way harder than I imagine?
EDIT: After scanning my own comment I see why... the idea is to not bundle Node.js and instead use the native JS engine which does not include Node APIs nor leverages the NPM ecosystem.