Thank you, @trwnh, this is a fabulous yet sad-making summary!
You’ve mentioned some people who recently pointed out serious issues with AS/AP, but frankly here at SocialHub the entire forum is filled to the brim with discussions on such issues and people who want to improve things. Many of whom have left disillusioned. The only concrete thing in the AS/AP ecosystem one can get, the only ‘good-practice’, seems to be “Start coding, you babbling fool!” and then you hack & slash, reverse-engineer, cut/copy/paste, interpret/imagine/fantasize. Create that protocol flavour and balance tech debt against mastodontology. Then, once you sacrificed enough blood, sweat and tears, you have become elite and can keep your own fedi app and protocol flavour going, build community around it, or cults.
The protocol open standards had a great start, then they didn’t evolve.
It is very sad, very, very frustrating, and it burns people out who want to see the entirety of the AS/AP ecosystem reach its full potential, not just individual apps. Yet here we are, after many years of work and trying.
It’s us, our collective, our commons, our ecosystem that fell short to make lasting improvements.
And now there are others knocking at the door. The open-for-business foundations, the enterpreneurial types, and the corporations.
If Meta launched a multi-million dollar dev portal today, à la React or GraphQL, they’d probably make rapid progress and lead the whole shebang in no time. And also, incidentally, I think they would not be afraid to break backwards-compatibility. Many people would be relieved by such development, despite their misgivings against Meta.
And @eprodrom is there too, with SWF, on a similar mission, and maybe pragmatic to avoid the previous scenario. The volunteers and the commons have failed, and SWF may have more luck with decent funding (and good salaries for their staff). I am not a fan of the impending corporate fedi takeover, that SWF promises to speed up, but other than that I have no particular opinion on this effort. It is logical that it now exists, and more similar initiatives will soon follow. It is up to Evan and friends to appeal to the folks in the existing ecosystem… or not.
Social Web and SocialHub
So what’s the status now? Among our 
achievements we find:
We have a grassroots, decentralized open ecosystem, with a bottom-up 3-stage dev process.
We have a FEP process where collected 73 (!!) Fediverse Enhancement Proposals.
I am particularly proud of where we collectively got the FEP process.
And here we start bumping into problems and areas where we 
must improve:
- We got a basic discussion forum going here, but not in any way a community of action.
- We need more people in staff roles, as moderator, admin, or in the well-being team.
- We need more people facilitating the FEP process. Currently @silverpill is a lonely
Hero. - We need more input and feedback on improvements to make to the various processes.
- We need focus on streamlining collaboration across the 3-stages of the ecosystem.
- Here @eprodrom (and @codenamedmitri) it really does not help to ignore prior efforts.
- It is fine to have a Task Force dedicate to activitypub.rocks, but not informing SocialHub which is hosted under that domain, is - idk where to begin - the exact opposite of good collab.
- And then we need hands raised and people rolling up their sleeves to do actual work.
- If that doesn’t happen… well, so be it.
- Without active contributions complaining about shortcomings is all we can do.