hi joris,
I share with you the same worry of having the ZOMG sucked by mercenaries, but to call our request a joke is also to disrespect Mission - Electric Coin Company - have you read it? - it is something that really enchants us. It is not easy to bring non-crypto techies to the game, and we try hard to do this in our multi-handed request, but it seems even harder to translate our Romance Language to the pragmatic mindset of yours; other values - probably it sounds too personal when we want to express our genuine intentions.
We started to do super interesting experiments with the MEMO fields for a message-based architecture while developing a unique Dark Pool having Zcash as a privacy layer to be able to anonymous swap in between +200 tokens directly from the traditional bank accounts of a country with 200M people… I see no joke here, and we believe it is extremely valuable. Maybe not for you.
You have a point on the lack of a explicit “deliverable”, but that is, as well, what researchers are about, specially when there are still 13 distinct disciplines and teacher to meet in the way.
Following the discussions about Fellowships in this Forum (also my bachelor is the result of a fellowship from the Ministry of Education of my country) and also having worked on NGOs with more than a million euros funds per year, it felt very natural to do such a non-orthodox proposal for a Team.
We are open for a constructive debate on how to improve decentralization.