This part is true, but for every single project where developers/workers get paid. I think in crypto this part is overused, with many people (not you) starting a sentence with, “as an investor …”. This is all true, but in many cultures this is an area of huge pressure and being reminded it’s normal people’s hard earned money is a pressure that makes it tough. It’s also tough to work on unknown quantities of work with timescales for very similar reasons. In addition (I do not mean to offend or anything here, please do not take it as this) the number of folk who wish for missed timescales to crucify projects is alarming. It gives of more negatives that not, in our experience anyway, this also adds to de-motivating workers.
For me these points make timescales very difficult to predict and accurate timescales impossible as they require knowledge of all the unknowns to be made into knowns if that makes sense. I think even recently twice we have been caught with anticipated 2 week tasks that have taken over 10 weeks. Ofc we see the opposite at times as well, I don’t think it’s lack of skill, I believe it’s part of the process. Like many large projects timescales and budgets are wild guesses and whilst necessary at times to make such predictions, I feel unless there is huge reason to then best not. Otherwise we stop development and back to analysing possible timescales, but we all know they will be wrong.
I doubt any project gets the balance correct, some try and easier problems are more accurate than unknown issues to predict. I think it’s just the long slog, like cure cancer, colonise mars etc. they are all difficult to predict, but we will very likely get there and faster if we work at it in a funded manner. We are now funded and should progress at full speed to launch with as little between us and that goal. I would hope after alpha 4 that we are close enough to give realistic timescales. I hope that is not too far off the horizon though, alpha 2 is very close, alpha 3 should be reasonably close behind that I hope (several weeks, low num months). THese are personal hpes though.
Sorry, this feels like a politician’s answer, I don’t mean it to be.