From my perspective, it has always looked like something is almost there. That’s why I have sold other coins, not this one. Well, that and the fact, that I don’t like any other project. I don’t really understand, or subscribe to, their goals. 
The thing that seems elusive to me is if the network is able to make decisions about it’s own structure or not. I am sure I am missing many dots, but the ones I see I connect roughly this way:
- April 2021 we had a testnet, that was up for five days. It was unstable, and making wider use of AE was thought to be the solution.
- Late 2021 it was realized, that AE is leaving the network in some kind of split brain situation, and consensus / membership stuff was thought to solve that.
- Spring 2022 consensus / membership was realized to still leave the network in undecisive state in some situations.
- June 2022 came the new idea to borrow code from Poanetwork and it was thought that:
- Now we are talking about:
- All the while when:
This confuses me, and makes me think I am not the only confused one around.
I think one the coolest progresses recently are those that allow better analytics about what is going on in the network. I’m talking about statemaps, flamegraphs and all that. I am all for them. And of course DBC’s and actually everything else is very good too. People are doing good work in their tracks, nothing to complain there. It just seems to me that the efforts could be organized better.
And I am not at all certain, that anything is “close”. I think that development strategies should be set so that there is as little time used in finding the wrong answers, until they hit the right one. Because one just cannot know what works, until it works. Nothing is ever “close”.