I’m always happy to respond to reasonable critiques of the Foundation’s activities @mika. But before I do, I wanted to add to @boxalex’s response to your first question:
The answer lies earlier in this (admittedly ever-more-difficult to navigate) thread, in my detailed response to @aristarchus:
In other words: this particular point was under debate in the last round of sentiment collection and the community indicated they’d support the Foundation at either 25%, 30%, or 50% of the dev fund. We were happy to use the most supported proposal as a basis which minimizes the amount within that range (particularly if it supports developing more third-party contributions to Zcash).
For more context on what that actually means for the Foundation in ZEC disbursements, @joshs shared a very useful spreadsheet with possible coin allocations which includes the amount the Foundation would receive at 5% of the reward/25% of the dev fund: 5468.75 ZEC per month. Before the dilution agreed to by all FR recipients to bolster the ECC’s funding, the Foundation was expecting close to 260,000 ZEC over 4 years, which is pretty close to this amount per month (260,000/48 = 5416.66 ZEC).
To your question about @anon16456014’s comment, I think @sonya’s response did a great job of summarizing the thinking behind the decision here:
…the best way to look at it is that Parity-Zcash was a proof of concept, and the options were to improve the existing code or to rewrite. ZF’s team decided that rewrite would result in a better product in the end without inflating the timeline too much (since improving Parity-Zcash would have also required lots of eng time).
The engineering roadmap post contains a more detailed rationale.
Would it have been better to start from scratch earlier? Of course. But when working on complex software — I heartily disagree that this is a “relatively simple task” — there are always degrees of ambiguity and unknowable unknowns, and more often than not what you think is the best possible decision is actually a local maxima. I don’t regret engaging in that project with the information I had then, and I don’t regret it now; it provided valuable feedback to our own efforts and gave us a blueprint of a proof of concept Zebra.
Most importantly, I completely agree with @anon16456014’s conclusion in the same comment you referenced:
You might also be interested in our annual State of the Foundation post, which I will be publishing in the coming weeks. Like the previous years’ updates I intend for it to provide a realistic, honest self-assessment of our progress.