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I'm here with you - $11m for pure long-term development without any hands-on application seems like a clear path to an over-engineered solution.

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Agreed. I worked on an open-source app development framework and found it really difficult to "do the right thing" unless we were actively building "real world" apps with it.

Although they have enough money to not do consulting - I strongly suggest they take on strategic apps (even for free!) that push the boundaries of the framework. It'll be a better product for it.

100% agreement. When your app behaves like a framework there needs to be examples of applications on top. I had the same dilemma when I was about to release my dashboard framework (https://my.infocaptor.com) . I had all the documentation but to truly demonstrate the framework and various different ways, we had to build various little dashboards. some of the dashboards were plain stupid like the "bug olympics" but they were built to demonstrate certain features which we did not have enough sample data to build upon.

The question is do you build "real valuable applications" or "not so useful but demo like apps". We built the 2nd category apps in first go and now with our customers we are helping them build the first category of applications.

That plan worked out amazingly well for Diaspora!

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