Look, I mostly do this because I find it meaningful. It pays miserably, and yet people always act like I'm making tons of money off of it, so a ton of people hate me and I don't even get to self-medicate by staring at a massive pile of cash. I've built a lot of really cool assets, but they (even the Cydia Store) are totally reliant on security flaws in something that is becoming more secure every day, so the work is even futile.

That doesn't mean, however, that I should be expected to perform miracles. I already work nearly every waking hour on things related to jailbreaking: "I'm giving er' all she's got, captain". For the record, by the way, here is what I'm up against today:

http://cache.saurik.com/tinyimg/cydia6hits.png

The game is also really difficult to predict. In this case, this is unlike any previous jailbreak, because they announced a specific time. I was not expecting them to announce a time: they have never announced a time before. I was not prepared for them to announce a specific time. What normally happens is there is a massive wave over the first few days while people find out about the jailbreak. Today, there were people watching a progress bar for hours until it hit 100%.

Meanwhile, you make it sound like it is really simple to take a payment transaction and licensing system, and just go "oh wow, we are doing over 10x the load? flip the switch boys!"... payment systems just don't work like that: this isn't some stupid web forum where you can play fast and loose with consistency (or even durability) to get more performance.

Also, six months to prepare? Seriously: you think I should spend six months while Cydia is losing money and there are no jailbreaks available--and there may never be a jailbreak available again--sitting around figuring out how to make a payment system scale infinitely so that during a small multi-hour long window it can shine?

Even in jailbreak-land, that is not the most important thing to be doing; one of my big time sinks this last half year was figuring out how to better deal with credit card fraud, for example. Leaving the world of payments, vendors are happier with more backend features, developers are happier with more Substrate improvements, and end users would prefer I make more tweaks or add things to WinterBoard.