If her work makes or breaks the company, and she's worth more than 80k on the open market, and she isn't "65% stake confident" in the founder, it's not a "sweetheart deal". It's a sucker's bet.

Again, it seems like you're talking as if there were "rules" about equity participation. You would have to have an absolutely awesome idea to make, for instance, a security researcher participate in a startup for no salary. Even if you pay one $50k, and that $50k cripples the startup and maxes out hardship for everyone else in the company, it's still a sucker deal for the researcher.

I'm using a familiar example to illustrate a point. It's a marketplace, not a secret society.

It is a marketplace. A marketplace where I know that good people exist that will not draw a standard salary and demand equity at the same time. (at least not in the levels we're using here)

And I don't care what you're doing, if it takes 12 months to get a prototype in django, you aren't worth 80K.

You're totally right about that. Sounds like there's a consensus that this project needed milestones.

I think there is also consensus that this dev wasn't very good. Not sure I have seen a site so complicated that you couldn't at least roughly approximate it in 12 months with django.

Whole deal sounds to me like she didn't give a crap about long term future of the company, she just wanted to ride the funding into the ground through her paycheck. I'd bet she demanded more equity in a moment of faith, but by that point they were doomed.