If Clang failed because of a lack of budget, then the failure was on the part of the project owners to set their funding threshold appropriately.
Of course that's on Stephenson, and he acknowledges it. He didn't understand the investment market. It probably wasn't a great plan in retrospect. But this seems like an odd place to complain when a risky investment doesn't pay off like you'd like.
The problem 100% was that Neal Stephenson was incapable of doing the project himself and was just hiring devs to do it and then ran out of money. It was poorly managed because they had lots of traction and risked basically no capital on development. If you give me half a million dollars I would have no problem getting that project to an early access state. Honestly I could do it with half that.
I can say that because I actually know how to make both the hardware and software side by myself if it came to that.
(Even if you are able to donate a year of developer time, valued in the six figures, which in fairness to your point is not something Stephenson brought to the table along with his relatively modest personal assets. Semi-famous authors aren't as rich as people think, either.)
I'm not saying I'm impressed with what they made, but I'm not too surprised either.
What they were trying to make was basically a better wiimote, and a wiimote is essentially an arduino with a single accelerometer hooked up to it and a bluetooth receiver. I think without the budget restrictions of a wiimote you could probably use better/more responsive parts and then basically just mimic a wiimote with the wiimotion plus(which is just a single gyroscope) and call it a day. Or you could add several of each of those components and then average their output or do other clever math with their separate outputs. I think this would take a little more than a year if the person who was doing it knew what they were doing.
Then you need to make the game/demo which you would do in parallel with a team of 3-4 additional people.
"Even if you are able to donate a year of developer time, valued in the six figures"
See this is where misunderstandings with kickstarter begin. We assumed almost no risk in making Road Redemption. In addition to salary we get 100% of revenue less distribution. So not only did we get to draw salary during development, now we get all the sales revenue and we own the IP. It is a crazy good deal, nobody needs to donate anything.
It is basically like you get a bunch of VC money and also the VC's have no equity interest.
The problem comes in when someone who is unqualified tries to middleman the operation and takes a bunch of money but is totally incapable of doing what they said they would do. Now they both don't have enough money to actually get the shit done at cost, and don't want to give away all the equity. The biggest problem though is that they are unqualified to discern who is capable of doing the task because they don't know anything about how to actually do things. So they fritter away the money and then the project falls apart.
Infact, that is specifically why I funded that kickstarter.
