Not keeping promises, trying to change the whole www (!) with 2 developers, internal fights, july controversy with team sending shifts to stolen accounts,... List go on, shift wont go nowhere imo. Its possible to be pumped but other than that no future. I say that as a small investor in shift.
1) RE "not keeping promises" and "internal fights": It's an open-source collaboration. One of the main old devs was a jerk who created a fork to ICO the fork clone for an easy cash grab. No way to prevent someone being an asshole if they want to be. That dev is not involved with Shift anymore. This set back their release until they could recruit more devs and regain their momentum.
2) RE "trying to change the whole www with 2 developers": Shift now has at least 3-4 devs that are continuing to build off the work of the past two years. So their original promises which were delayed in Q3 have been worked toward by their whole team since then and are completely achievable now by the end of Q4.
3) RE "july controversy sending shifts to stolen accounts": I think you're confusing another issue here, are you referring to victims being compensated by the devs out of their own wallet? Because that was a good thing which showed how trustworthy the team is toward the community. If you're not referring to this then please explain.
The internal team issues which caused the missed deadlines in Q3 were entirely the result of one main dev and one minor dev being assholes and those people are no longer with the project, which has in the meantime continued its march onward to still being the first to market with a decentralized web and file hosting dApp.
I thought like you did at first glance but realized when peeling under the surface that all of the reasons the market cap was suppressed were temporary reactions to temporary causes; hence the token was massively undervalued back in early October from the perspective of a 3-month time frame when the testnet prototype would launch publicly, much less a 6-month time frame when further development would push it much higher.
It seems I was spot on given that despite the aforementioned temporary factors, i.e. that had temporarily disrupted its momentum and held back the market cap, Shift has been in a fairly robust uptrend that is clearly visible on the 1-year, 3-month, 1-month, and 1-week charts. Since early October it's gone over 4X from its low to its high, and it's on track to probably keep an accumulation trend that tops at $4-5 two weeks from now and pumps Shift to $10-15 when the testnet Phantom release happens at the end of the month.
And all of this is happening without marketing. According to their last newsletter, they have increased their team by over 30% adding marketers in the last month and real marketing is going to start in Q1 2018 on the heels of having a working prototype to market to investors. I think therefore Shift can 3-5X its early Q1 price by the end of Q1, i.e. to reach $30-50 per Shift or more. Back in early October this looked like a dark horse to me, but now all of the signs have been growing and it's becoming more obvious that this will massively break out, starting end of Q4 and continuing through end of Q1. Beginning a month ago, I've been calling out these movements pretty much spot on so far in this thread here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2429910
