I'm not going to back just any crypto project, but with the right people leading the charge I would get behind it.

(Unrelated to GPG, but this goes towards crypto projects by Moxie and other solid people.)

This attitude is why GnuPG (and other PGP implementations) are in a position to be criticized by the Moxies of the world. Is there some particular reason why anybody outside of some recognized elite should be discouraged from at least trying to create a better, improved system? Yeah, they'll probably fail in a lot of cases, but if the world really wants a modern, easy-to-use alternative to PGP (a real alternative, not use-case-specific alternatives like RedPhone and TextSecure; encrypted/signed email is still a valid use case that both those things blissfully ignore, by the way), this sort of attitude - that anyone outside of a select few rightfully deserves to be scolded for trying to make better crypto - is lethally toxic to that goal.

In between the time that a cryptographically illiterate developer releases their MVP 1.0 version and the time that it's discovered that their cryptography is fundamentally flawed --- a window of time that can stretch on for years --- actual people will rely on the tool for their security, not realizing that serious adversaries are reading their messages.

Most new cryptosystems --- a cryptosystem being "anything that uses a cipher, including when the cipher is simply AES --- are terribly broken.

Search for [decryptocat] for an extremely good example of what I'm talking about.

Developers who are new to cryptography that want to learn more about it and eventually use it in their own systems should start by learning how to exploit broken cryptography. If you can't exploit an RSA padding oracle, you shouldn't be designing systems that use public key cryptography. If you can't exploit a CTR nonce stutter, you shouldn't be using block crypto.

Developers who don't want to learn cryptography should work on improving the UX (UI and workflow) of existing cryptosystems. PGP could sure use some help, but even if you don't want to help with PGP, there's a huge green field of work to be done on browser TLS trust and CA user interface. Just as one example.

This results in things like GnuPG being considered hard to use. This results in things like GnuPG struggling along with a single core developer and barely enough funding to support that developer (even now). This results in things like OpenSSL being horribly undermaintained, to the point where nasty bugs like Heartbleed are allowed to exist longer than they should because there is an insufficient quantity of eyeballs to find them and squish them. It doesn't take a rocket surgeon or a cryptographic guru to see that this is nothing but an awful situation for pretty much everyone involved.

i think any 3rd party distributed crypto is only useful against weaker adversaries (weaker than the person doing the distributing). For p2p crypto designed and agreed to by the two parties, there are lots of options, starting with a 1-time pad, CTR mode hash based ciphers, etc...