Sorry to hear about the heartache ...
Let me try address some things quickly, without going on and on ...
- We have been working on the Greyhole UI for a little while, using our new plugin architecture.
- We tried to hire someone to make it to our specifications. We could get it done for several thousand dollars (2K to 3K?). We had a RoR freelancer who helped with the update to Amahi 7 (we reimplemented a nearly the whole platform), and we contacted him a few weeks ago, however, he's busy for the foreseeable future. Finding decent developers that do not break the bank is extremely hard.
- We will get it released with Amahi 7.2 (I will lead the coding effort unless we can find someone)
- The iOS app (which was something Amahi really really really needed), costed more than twice as much, which put a strain on things
- We do not take a salary and Amahi does not generate a lot of cash flow after the bills are paid. We have to be extra careful how we leverage our resources.
- Running Amahi takes some effort (we don't just sit around doing nothing). There is no spam here in the forums or in the wiki, things are well organized, in great part thanks to our volunteers, lead first of all by @bigfoot65, who makes a truly stellar job.
- We had near-disasters before, with web spam, email spam, web attacks, a failing VM upgrade unexpectedly almost destroyed the wiki and lots of small fires happening all the time. We then needed to implement regular backups, database cleanups, spam fighting techniques, email management, cloud storage management for Pro/Ninja users, Amahi Anywhere service now, bug fixing, updates, etc. etc. etc. (we could fill HOURS on anecdotes about fights with spammers, etc.)
- We do not do a lot with community, marketing and outreach ...
- We tried to have a testers program. It failed initially in a disastrous manner. Check the wiki, but basically people wanted to try and try apps and all they wanted were fixes NOW, BECAUSE IT'S ALMOST THERE, and did not really debug. This created a general tense, non-stop pressure atmosphere with the team. We later came up with a plan with some challenges, rewards and similar elements, but we did not get to implement it (takes a fair bit of work and it's not 100% clear it would work, so we would prefer something smaller and execute it step-wise).
- Ubuntu vs. Fedora ... we will support Ubuntu LTS if we have a good contributor in the team, even if we prefer to stick to one distro. We do not have enough momentum to roll our own rolling distribution.