The question to ZCG and others was explicit: Shouldn’t a node developer be hired to help get the node up to date, and keep it up to date? I explored that at length, including why “hire more developers” is not a Mythical Man-Month issue here.
As it was originally justified to ZEC buyers (and as I have always supported), the entire purpose of the Founder’s Fee is to pay the people who create Zcash. For otherwise, there is nothing to market. To reply in this thread with off-topic advocacy of expenditure on marketing is putting the cart before the horse, at best.
[Edit before posting: I drafted much of this post yesterday. I missed what happened in 2019–2020, and somehow retconned the Dev Fund onto the Founder’s Fee while forgetting that it was supposed to sunset. Yet another thing that will require much reading to catch up with… If you offer money to the public, you need to understand that people will use it as money. Most users of the U.S. dollar do not follow the twists and vagaries of Fed policy; they never even realize what is being done to their money. That’s one reason why people trust Bitcoin: You can put your BTC into cold storage, go into a coma, wake up years later, and you are absolutely guaranteed that the economic policy of your BTC will not have changed.
Please read this post, and my prior posts, subject to this proviso. I may subsequently change my position based on a better understanding of the situation here.]
I will snip most of this condescending lecture on marketing. I understand very well how marketing works…
…and I don’t need to be insulted with this type of strawman. Creating dope memes and yelling “BUY ZEC!” in a tiktok dance to your 4 followers who already know you would just be more of the low-grade stereotypical altcoin nonsense. Uninteresting. And repulsive.
Here are some actual quotes from private discussions in the past few weeks about my recent posts on this forum, with someone smart and successful to whom I have been futilely advocating ZEC for years:
Good luck lol I am not gonna advocate for something like that
You are advocating to shitcoiners, hard that this will be productive or convince anyone at least in public.
[nullius:] they have hands-down the best technology for on-chain privacy. how could they screw the rest up?
My instincs tend to be more right than wrong
So, why do my Bitcoin maximalist friends have much more money than I do? 
Well, among other things: As I all too painfully know off the top of my head, ZEC is down over 97% against BTC from summer 2017 to summer 2022.
Bye-bye, precious BTC. 
(For comparison, during this same time period when BTC has outperformed ZEC by about 35x, BTC has outperformed ETH by about 2x–3x.)
Everyone seems to have ideas fantasies about how to capture “the next billion users”. Please, stop doing this. It is entirely dissociated from reality.
Scattered in various posts, I myself have mentioned some growth strategies that are firmly based in reality. I would write more about that, if I were not wasting my time and energy trying to catch up on all the exercises in desperate foot-shooting. (Disclosure: I have some investments in potential near-future Zcash competitors that I believe have better strategic thinking. Business-focused. Not trying to pump to retail moon-chasers on social media.)
Speak for yourself. I am not part of your “we”.
I don’t use social media. None of my tech-savvy, privacy-oriented Bitcoiner friends use social media. With the exception of some public figures such as Snowden, people who care about privacy eschew social media.
Social media are designed to suss out your social graph—some of the most important, intimate information to keep private, together with your financial transaction graph. Simply on grounds of privacy, I would much rather perform in porn and avoid social media than the inverse: It would result in less exposure.
(Aside, one of the reasons why PGP WoT failed is that it exposes your social graph and trust relationships. Advanced PGP users understand privacy; advanced PGP users are the only ones who understand WoT. Thus, WoT was doomed.)
With your condescending and misdirected lectures on the virtues of “marketing”, you are actively alienating planning, strategy, and talent. That’s a shame, when the market suggests that Zcash needs some fresh ideas.
Back on topic:
Forget mass-adoption: You are dismissing the importance of a feature of prime importance in Zcash’s privacy coin niche.
Onion v3 support is a basic checkbox feature for network-layer privacy; to lack it is embarrassing. Zcash has the best blockchain privacy technology, but it is far behind Bitcoin everywhere else—including network-layer privacy. (The Bitcoin ecosystem has even had privacy-protected, user-defined assets for years—far ahead of the belated ZSA implementation—although not on mainnet, and with privacy much inferior to what Zcash could provide. Mostly applied for business use—most retail BTC buyers don’t even know about such things.)
Moreover, your argument comes off as belittling Uncle Jim and Aunt Susie in Duluth—and it is not very respectful of their privacy. Why do you think that they don’t they need Tor?
I am thrilled that Zcash+Tor is being used by geniuses with PhDs from MIT—see the above discussion! Now, what about Uncle Jim and Aunt Susie in Duluth? Don’t they deserve onions, too?
I am guessing that they probably don’t know how to set up AutomapHostsOnResolve (and configure things so that DNS lookups go to Tor’s DNSPort, and…), search for people running Zcash onion v3 nodes (even I didn’t do that!), and manually add custom nodes that zcashd doesn’t know how to gossip.
I would love to get Uncle Jim and Aunt Susie in Duluth onto Tor, and get them using Zcash with Tor. To facilitate this, in one of the other grant proposal threads, I advocated that an ease-of-use node setup grant should stipulate a Tor configuration option as an MVP deliverable.
A point-and-click way for Uncle Jim and Aunt Susie in Duluth to setup Zcash+Tor on a Raspberry Pi would be an appropriate usage for developer funding money. (Not speaking from financial self-interest: I did not apply for that grant, probably won’t, and probably can’t because I refuse KYC.) [See above proviso.]
Word of mouth works. Last month, someone sometimes alleged to be me got into a flamewar with a Monero user over this. The Monero user ended up apologizing for his “fucking trusted setup scam” rant (actual quote, somewhat compressed). That would have been a great moment for bringing Monero users to Zcash—if the Zcash advocate hadn’t had to wind up admitting that Zcash is now chasing the POS fad, and ZEC has unreliable economics. Oh, yes: And Zcash doesn’t support onions. 
Self-described Bitcoin maximalists who make one little exception for XMR are commonplace. The Bitcoin Forum administrator is known to have some weird affinity for GRIN. Many Bitcoiners care deeply about privacy. Insofar as I can tell, nowadays, those like me with a BTC+ZEC focus are marginal. Ever wonder why?
Anyway, you neatly illustrated here the importance of developers. Despite some relatively small disagreement with their Zcash direction in the past, I always supported the Zcash Company/ECC people because I know they do things like killing off the trusted setup. From watching discussions in GH and this forum, I inferred that they probably hated it as much as I did. I was not surprised when I found out about their work on Halo.
Without development, there is nothing for “marketing”.
…
Well, among other things: As I all too painfully know off the top of my head, ZEC is down over 97% against BTC from summer 2017 to summer 2022.