Why don't all these Pinephone fans put more of their time and their money into funding an international effort to reverse closed blobs instead of repeated crowing over the success of their reverse engineering efforts and how willing they are to fork out good money on outdated hardware?
But... in the short term, given that's not currently the case, we still need a way to move forward, right? And it's much easier to demonstrate why free drivers are important if you have working software to show for it. ("Hey, there's this whole phone OS and app ecosystem that we could run on this hardware if it had free drivers!")
That said, yes, the endless reverse engineering required to keep the devices you've bought secure beyond the 2 or 3 years that the manufacturer supports it is ridiculous. I wish it weren't so. But given that that's unfortunately the situation we're in, I applaud anyone contributing to the RE efforts. (But I sure am keeping an eye on hardware that doesn't require it!)
2.) I think you misunderstand what the Pinephone is -- if my memory serves me correctly, minus the modem blob, there is no need for reverse engineering, as the documentation for the hardware is available. You're talking about sending good money after bad ideas while advocating stopping the thing that has a clear path to victory (starting from a clean slate with something that has real documentation) in favor of something else that has a negligible chance of ever happening (having source be released for drivers but not getting any documentation for it).
Mandating a release of detailed HW documentation (datasheets for all the parts + device schematics) prior to being able to sell devices would also be an interesting experiment.