I completely believe Allan when he makes the "house without windows" analogy because this matches my own experience. As he said: don't ask for feedback when you already know what has to be done. For a version 0.1 you want feedback because you don't know which features are considered most important and you want to get hype going, etc. For a version 2.0 this doesn't work, because the ONLY FEEDBACK you're going to get is the whiny "but why doesn't it do X yet?" and "I wish you'd add feature Y", or "This icon is misaligned" or "There's a typo in this menu bar". The users mean well, but you know about all these flaws already because they're staring you in the face EVERY SINGLE DAY.
Releasing a complete rewrite is very difficult and takes a lot of stamina. As long as Allan is making progress every day (and I have no reason to question this) he'll get there eventually.
Getting "some kind of version" out there in 6 months would be a terrible mistake.
Anyone who has been burnt out should recognize that as a perfect description of it. It actually made me very sad to read that, since it reminded me so forcefully of times when I was burnt out - and I'm worried I'm close to that point again.
- "my motivation and optimism is anything but constant"
- "which will make me think it is all hopeless"
- "these will just be a reflection of my mood that day, which is anything but constant"
Allan may or may not be burned out. It isn't an unfounded observation, though. His comments sound a lot like burnout to me.
Right now, I love TextMate. It's the best text editor out of the box, but the fact of the matter is: OSX is not my only development machine and the hassle of learning Vim keybinds is less painful than only using OSX for development.