>I wish Mozilla would've just funded or partnered with one of several existing players in that space, such as Jolla.
They did. They partnered with Meego (The Intel and Nokia lead platform.). Remember Meego?
It was the wrong approach because gobs of Javascript gives a horrible UX on low-end, first-iPhone-equivalent hardware, but it was approach they wanted because they're so invested in the notion that FirefoxOS would natively implement Web Platform APIs; conversely those platform APIs would become standard Web-(browser) APIs in the future [1].
Sadly, their ideological mission conflicted with the realities of their target market (and in this case, price-point).
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/Firefox_OS/...
Firefox OS (or more generally, a free phone&OS) is something I do believe is needed but Mozilla had the completely wrong approach towards it. They severely underestimated how much effort is involved. I heard from several mozillians the attitude was "we'll just do everything in HTML5 and gecko will do just fine". (Sounds familiar? It was Jobs' vision for iOS. See how that turned out.)
They didn't understand how much work is involved into making not just a platform, but also an OS (with all the builtin apps, making them not suck is a prerequisite) and the hardware itself. My Flame's only redeeming quality was that the battery died after a week, which kept me from finding out more issues with it.
I don't know that FxOs was ever a solid choice. It was barely ever even a choice. I wish Mozilla would've just funded or partnered with one of several existing players in that space, such as Jolla.