that's an interesting perspective. was it your view all along that the 'mainline' client was actually just a proof-of-concept, and that the client side of things would eventually be taken over by third parties?
Sure-- I've always liked the BitTorrent/W3C model because it is less centralized (lots of different implementations of the protocol, as opposed to a project like Perl, where essentially everybody runs the same code). I consider Satoshi's code the "reference" client, though, not "proof-of-concept", since there is no formal specification.(I've written a formal specification, and I think having a working reference implementation is better than An Officially Blessed Pile of Paper).