Thank you for sharing your thoughts, criticism is valuable and one can only grow from it. I feel the foundation could have done a lot of things better and had we had a time machine we certainly would have.

One of our biggest failures is that we were too nice and considerate of the market in the early days we didn't dump Blurt on the community other than what was needed to pay for certain exchange listings at the time, we anticipated a rise in price which would have sustained development for years to come.

Unfortunately, there were actors who wanted Blurt to fail and we suffered many attacks, the initial cock bloat attack which forced us to implement fees, whales loyal to other chains continually dumping, the Christmas witness properties bloat attack, personal and social attacks and the hack of WBlurt.

The small foundation team had to weather all of this and through all of it, we never threw in the towel. Even when our star developer Ericet left in January because of having had enough of the setbacks and taking his public node, tools and frontend with him as well as leaving our front-ends in disarray.

The foundation hasn't had any time to build, market, or even communicate to the community in an effective manner. It is hard to communicate when you don't know for certain an ETA on anything, we work on a best effort basis when our part-time developers have time from their work and personal lives, sometimes there are delays with no clear completion date, and then sometimes we are blessed with notifications that some tasks have been completed.

This HF was a big win as far as delivery is concerned, I wasn't even sure it would be delivered, even when it was finished there were issues with the Raspberry Pi build which had me scrambling to find someone to fix it so we could complete the HF and not leave the Raspberry Pi behind.

You are not wrong that we are thinly staffed, I bare all to you, and state that is exactly the case. Not only are we thinly staffed, but we are thin in non-Blurt financial resources for reasons explained above and what we do have we are saving to remunerate developers for their adhoc work.

Blurt however is not a company, Blurt is a public blockchain and anyone can build a company on it. The Foundation is merely a steering committee, we don't own the chain nor do we want to, we help protect it and guide it, we were there when the chain was attacked and we mitigated each one of the attack vectors and the chain is more secure now than ever.

The foundation is committed to the following for the month ahead:

1. Restoring Blurt.world and Blurt.blog frontends
2. Repairing the image server
3. Fixing small issues on the Blurt Wallet like the NaN error and still showing 13 Power Down on initiation.
4. Once the above is in place and Blurt is on a stable infra base, I plan to get us some media exposure for our lightweight raspberry Pi consensus capabilities.

Beyond this, I don't wish to promise anything and it all depends on the availability of human resources.

I sincerely hope that in future, more people will rise up and be willing to work with the foundation to drive Blurt forward or even start their own businesses and projects on Blurt, diversity of tools, apps and projects is key to its growth.

To me Blurt doesn't have to be only a blogging platform, I often found ways to diversify Steem/Hive into other uses such as dlease.io for DeFi-like investing and @bitsports for on-chain sports prediction games. Blurt can be anything, it can be like Insta (I'm currently encouraging that), real people will bring more real people, a selfie is more personal and legitimate than a photo of a plant that could be hard to distinguish from a stock photo. There can be a video platform like 3Speak, a Twitter type app for short form content.

The beauty is that Blurt does not discriminate against content type, it is an open public blockchain data store.

Now on this recent rewards saga, I too feel it was counterproductive to lynch @rycharde for the rewards drop, he is doing great work in trying to understand and improve the economics, there are supportive ways to enter into discussions, rather than antagonistic ways, I always try to be diplomatic in all aspects and I am deeply saddened by what has been occurring.

As mentioned we have a small team and limited resources, as it is, being pulled into PR situations is just slowing down progress even further.

The foundation helped give birth to the Blurt chain, it is given freely and openly for anyone to make a home here and build atop of it, it is an opportunity for a fresh start from other similar platforms, the price is low enough for anyone to become dolphins, orcas and whales, the only way forward is up, so I encourage people to be part of the solution to growth and improvement.

The foundation can only do so much, it takes a community to raise a blockchain to greatness!