I would love to hear your perspective on what makes our development model different. What do you like or dislike about it?
The major difference is there's a company behind these ideas, while Bitcoin and other altcoin projects are purely volunteer based.
This seems to be a hybrid approach between BTC and Ripple; The way I see it, no mining, thus unfair control of total money supple, was the key reason for the lack of interest in Ripple.
For many OS projects, it's difficult to ask dev team to contribute a lot of hours without proper incentive (i.e. donation), causing slow progress and stagnation of code base.
I like the company model better because it should be relatively easy to get things done; however cryptocurrency open source projects are special (because money is directly involved), it's tricky to strike the right balance between contributing to the community and benefiting from it, especially when you have the dominant power and control.