Since you seem to share Nominatim's goals, why have you decided to create your own solution rather than work to improve Nominatim's weaknesses? Genuinely curious.
For some context, my company, Lokku, has sponsored many a SotM (including the first one in 2007, and we're sponsoring SotM-EU next month), has repeatedly donated what I like to think are significant sums to the OSM foundation, and this year our company xmas gift to clients was a donation on their behalf to HOT-OSM. We're members of the UK's Open Data Institute, were one of the first companies to move to using OSM tiles in place of Google, run #geomob (a geo innovation meetup in London, hope to see you at our next one which happens to be tomorrow), and actively invest in geo start ups like SplashMaps. So I think I can safely say: we get it.
We've looked at nominatim and contributed to the code. Like any complex codebase it has strengths and weaknesses. It is a significant improvement on what came before, congrats to all who contributed. It does not follow from that that all effort at inventing a better future has to fall under the nominatim umbrella.
My question is not should we try to build a better geocoding service (be it an extension of nominatim, a replacement of nominatim, or whatever) It is what would it look like?
Some links to the various points above about what we've been up to at Lokku http://geomobldn.org/ http://blog.lokku.com/post/77055320403/investing-in-splashma... http://blog.lokku.com/post/70479246283/donating-to-the-human...
But that is exactly what I'm asking you. To put it simply: Why does this not follow?
It seems to me that it would be far better if everyone was working in the same direction, rather than forking the effort.
If you have some specific/commercial application in mind, I would understand, but this seems to contrast with your general request made here.
If you think the problems with Nominatim cannot be overcome within Nominatim, what makes you think that you can do as good a job and overcome those problems without Nominatim? That doesn't fully make sense to me yet.
I've annoyed you enough, sorry :) Thanks for your patience.