Well, I'm a software developer. Admittedly I am new to crypto development, but I have been a professional software engineer for a little over 20 years.

When you are working on a product you should have a general idea of how close you are to done. Sure stuff happens and you find problems you didn't expect and so on. But it's never really a mystery. Inside the Augur team there are things like a backlog of unfinished or partially finished work and a bug database that contains all the issues they need to solve.

Any engineer who has access to the backlog, the bug database and the code should have at least a general idea of how close they are to shipping. When I say general I mean things like, "We are just a couple of months away from being ready" to "We haven't even started in on refactoring the foobar library and that will take at least six months, so there is no way we are shipping in less than 12 months."

But the communications I hear - which I admit are mostly second hand - are things like "We are doing something never done before and so we don't know when it will be ready, but we won't ship until it is."

That's just too vague. What's the real deal? Is the system architecture set yet? Are there basic algorithmic problems that haven't been solved yet? Is the code feature complete and the team is just working through bugs, or are there major feature areas that are still stubbed out?

So, maybe everything is fine. But it is also possible that the Augur team is not up to the job. That happens a lot. Most software projects don't ship because writing good software is hard, and sometimes the solution for a problem isn't good enough and the team can't find a way to fix it. Sometimes projects even try to tackle problems that just can't be solved with the approach taken. For instance what if Augur can work, but it will cost $10 million per day to run?

I guess as an engineer I just want to hear something more than "It will be ready when it is ready" and as an engineering manager those words usually mean "I am in over my head and I'm afraid to ask for help."

Now, if that is the case then I hope the team does ask for help. The idea is great and I honestly cannot wait to start using Augur. I want nothing but success for this project and I hope the entire team gets rich as sin. But if they need help then they need to ask for it.

I bought in to the ICO and honestly I think a solid team could have produced the entire project from scratch in the time since the coin was released. The lack of visible progress makes me wonder if it isn't time to look elsewhere.