I don't mind feedback being blunt, as long as you don't mind me being similarly so.
Such a comparison is extremely short sighted and partly inaccurate.
- Development started in 2009, not 2010.
- The lawsuit kicked in about 18 months after development started, and by the time it reared its head, the software was just approaching Beta 1 so was practically finished.
- XenForo 1.0.0 was released just under two years after development began.
- That means it took two years to develop XenForo 1.0.0 vs the coming up to three years to develop XenForo 2.0.0.
So, how has it taken longer for three developers to develop XenForo 2.0.0 vs. the two developers it took to develop XenForo 1.0.0? Most people can appreciate and understand...
Quite simply, in 2009-2010, Mike and Kier were developing XenForo 1.0.0, whereas Mike, Kier and I are rewriting/developing:
While we're doing that monumental task, we're also supporting and maintaining all of the above. We're also fielding and spending time that should be spent developing answering questions such as this.
In the middle of the three years we're talking about, Mike and I took pretty much 4-6 months off developing XenForo 2.0.0 so we could release XenForo 1.5.0. Amongst all of this, we're still answering tickets, support questions on the forum, writing documentation for things and doing our best to keep people informed of where we are.
If you ever get the opportunity, install XenForo 1.0.0 some time and compare it side by side to XenForo 1.5.13. XenForo 1.0.0 was a XenForo that only had a fraction of the support commitments, a fraction of the functionality, a fraction (basically none) additional products to support. No responsive design. In fact, if you look through the
Have You Seen forum from pages 1-4 you will see all of these familiar looking features that we're using extensively now that probably weren't even conceived in that initial 2 year development period. And when you're developing a product from scratch you have basically no customer expectations to meet, there's room to take an iterative approach to things and there's just basically no barriers in front of you.
We've held our hands up to the fact that the announcement was perhaps a bit early, and in an ideal world we'd definitely like to be further forward now than we are. But when you actually think about the absolute mammoth task that we've had in front of us, 3 years is really no time at all.