We totally agree that when things have a solid foundation it makes sense to build on top of them. The problem we saw with Phonegap was several design decisions we disagreed with (as we described briefly in the blog post).

This left us with the option of putting up with it (and ending up with an inferior product), or writing our own bridge, and writing our own bridge made sense. Of course you are right in that writing anything new means you have to work hard to get it to as high a standard as the alternatives, which is why we work hard to test our platform - see http://trigger.io/cross-platform-application-development-blo....

It's also important to remember that the native bridge is just one part of our product, we also write the code that generates and builds the app, which we want to integrate as tightly as possible. Writing our own bridge makes this a lot easier to do well.