On a related note, I am getting nervous. I am seriously questioning the management and organization of the bitshares team. Your idea was so great, but it really seems like you are failing to execute. You need better personnel, scheduling, and task management.
I can't really give you any reassurance because so far everything you have said is correct and they have proven to be incompetent at meeting a deadline or getting a product out in time. We are now approximately 2-3 months behind where we were initially promised this summer, we were supposed to get a release and marketing in November, lol! That was eventually revealed to be nothing but empty promises.
I believe that many of the paid delegates are very competent, and could get viral growth going in time, but they are all currently stymied by the lack of a viable product, which they have been waiting on the dev team for.
The main problem is that rather than getting a good idea and then executing on it full force, they just come up with another idea, and another, and split time among all of these wonderful ideas, when what we really need first is a usable product. Some of these ideas have even been harmful, such as whatever idea Bytemaster apparently had for making VOTE be able to murder Bitshares, which then resulted in a huge dilution and breaking the hearts of the whole chinese community, especially those who had bought DNS. This essentially killed the one thing that was going well for bitshares, which was that it was catching on in China. The chinese marketing team (which is actually competent!) has been working hard to overcome the bitshares team shitting all over their efforts, and looks to be building momentum again, (but only if we can ever get a stable product released, and dont destroy their efforts yet again by adding gambling to the client which they have said will make all their chinese business partners flee from it).
So you should probably sell all your shares and walk away, unless you want to continue to invest in this product of idealist dreamers who have the potential to create something amazing that will change the world, but probably will never succeed because they cannot focus on priorities and they keep shooting themselves in the foot.
Paid delegates are the hope of Bitshares, because if we can ever manage to get a stable client out, then some people who are actually good at promoting things can do their magic and promote it, and get some viral growth. And as Bitshares grows, paid delegates will attract more and more capital and businesses to ally with it for delegate positions.
I just hope it doenst die first.
(Apologies to everyone who is working hard on Bitshares, with this depressing and critical post. I have been feeling a lot like Teenagecheese, given that its February and I dont see a lite client or release version yet. There ARE a lot of positive things going on and we should not minimize them. Its also been several months now since the broken promises of november and we havent seen improvement in some areas. One begins to get skeptical that the current promises might be broken as well).