Yea I see what you're saying. We built on top of bodymovin which was an already open source. Hernan put a ton of work into it that we were able to stand on top of. We wouldn't have even started Lottie without his project.

Personally I think theres plenty of room for all three, Lottie, Squall and Keyframes.

We still use Squall here at Airbnb because Squall has some things to offer that Lottie doesn't. The After Effects preview app is really dope, and we'll never make one of those. We may not use it in our codebase, but to anyone wanting to seriously use Lottie I would recommend buying Squall so you can preview on your device so easy.

I'm currently facing the same dilemma as an indie developer working on a data analysis/data visualization product. Companies like Tableau and co can afford to squeeze the juice of indie developers by offering similar featured products for free. I try not to get discouraged though. I think the field is really large and there are quite a ton of ways to make inroads these days but I think it's also important to play in large enough markets, so better to play in the $120bn+ data analytics market than some $100m market with one well-nourished, fast moving white shark.