In an abstract concept things may feel this way, but in the practice of the past 5-6 years and $30,000,000 of spending at the ECC, we have more than enough evidence that pairing software engineering and research with marketing, compliance/ regulatory, and communications all within the ECC didn’t create great results, not in terms of products, adoption, usability, popularity, or ZEC investor returns.
Marketers will never have a viable Zcash product to sell until ZEC recovers in relative value and demonstrates itself as an investable asset. Let’s not be romantic about what crypto is in the realm of sub-1 billion dollar market cap altcoins. Crypto for a project like Zcash is a peculiar investor proposition where the number must go up; impressive network or wallet functionalities and other esoteric (as perceived from outside of the project) use cases are after thoughts (or punchlines) if the number on the chart is bad.
My recommendation about separating and globalizing Zcash’s Marketing, Communications, and Regulatory activities with a distinct new organization has more to do with the theme of decentralizing and globalizing the ecosystem than it does about the day-to-day nuances about how to help engineers & researchers interface with non-engineers (marketers, policy lobbyists, or compliance lawyers).
Again, I’m making my recommendation based on relatively speaking poor past results and the current financial/ roadmap distress that ECC finds itself in; not based on a conceptual opinion about how projects, products, and marketing ought to work as written in a Business textbook. We all know about the definition of insanity.