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...