Thanks for the kind words
I guess for a while I sort of was the face of SMF, but it became increasingly clear that all is not well. Despite protestations from the team to the contrary it is my belief that all is still not well, and that the increase of 'democracy' hasn't helped one bit.
I'm not going to comment any further on them; they will be known for what they do and don't do going forward. I do know, however, that everything that's going on now is descended from pretty much everything that happened in 2010. It could all have been so different, but I think in the end, we would have gone our own way anyway; as has been said elsewhere, all the time we shared their vision, they were content to have us be their whipping boy, the moment we started to eschew that and have our OWN vision (bearing in mind we have the skills to fully realise any vision we have), that's the point we would have gone our own way. All that transpired just made it easier.
Mr Brackets is quite a way away from the current code; he left around 2005 due to the politics, and came back for a brief spell to try and help at the end of 2009 when this started to hit the fan, but into 2010 it spiralled and while I know he's busy with real life, I get the impression that he accepted it wasn't ever going to change and put it behind him.
As it happens, I have never quite seen myself on Unknown's level, some of the technical discussions he's been part of sort of put me to shame at times, but then I remember that he's been doing the whole PHP thing on a professional level for longer than I have - he was working with PHP at a professional level when I was still learning the language for the first time.
What we do share, though - what I think people like Zef, like Unknown and like myself and Nao have in common - we share the ability to take inspiration and fully realise it without being afraid of its consequences; all too often I've seen comments from devs about how complex things are (and I've made them with respect to some things people want to do) and not wanting to get involved.
There was a discussion for example about changing the permissions in SMF for 2.1 to go back to how 1.1 does it. Never mind why the changes in 2.0 were done, they're not relevant, they're just 'broken'. They've actively discussed making 2.1's permissions the same as 1.1's, though I doubt that's the final course they'll take. They're not interested in sitting down and polishing every aspect of it till it shines, merely until it's good enough. (I find it hilarious that at least one of the devs refuses to use 2.0 on his own sites because of permissions)
They do an awful lot of talking and not a lot of actual *doing* from what I've seen, maybe because they're afraid of the consequences. Well, Nao and I are officially those consequences, and whatever happens this year, as 2.0 staggers to a final release and then we march on doing what we do, we can safely let you be the judge of whether we did right to go our own way, but it's safe to say, from where we stand, we think we did the right thing.