I agree, prior discussions on the mailing list have been unable to resolve this though. There are two directions in which to progress: 1) Convert the project to be primarily about the federation protocol (which was the original direction of FedOne), with the existing client being a 'demonstration' implementation of the protocol. This sets our market to be other developers. 2) Be client specific, extend the existing client, add mobile support etc. Setting our market to be users directly. 'The next communications platform'.
(2) is what we have been mostly doing for the last couple of years, but our Java6+GWT+Ant+Subversion (only recently switched to git) stack was failing to attract new developers. There were several calls to rewrite the entire thing in (say) javascript.