I dont think Im failing to realize anything bud. I mean, sure it could have cost 1.5M with 10 people full time for a year or two but im sure even I who has zero experience in building sites, or forums could have hired a team to build it and it would have cost a fraction of the price. I mean seriously.. I know people who have built websites before, ma of them and I never heard about any costing crazy amounts.
Anyway. I guess only time will tell, but Im betting on most of that money going into his pockets and not into the forum.
Again, $1.5m may sound like a lot, but split amongst a team of people over years, it really isn't. Building epochtalk is really a colossal task. Its not like designing a website, its building a multifaceted and interactive software to compete and surpass other forum softwares in terms of usability. The reason Bitcointalk hasn't updated its SMF version in forever, is because so many custom add ons are already in place just to make this forum usable, updating and then fixing compatibility would take thousands of hours. SMF is so broken, without Theymos' custom patches, Bitcointalk wouldn't be able to handle nearly as many people as it has right now. Stop thinking about the cost to build something like SMF, Epochtalk will be on a different level.
The backend of Bitcointalk is pathetic. The moderator tools are patched together, the admin tools are patched together, user functionality is at a minimum, there isn't integrated PGP, there isn't integrated Bitcoin message signing, there aren't integrated market tools, you can't delete anything because SMF is single threaded, the entire system is archaic and slow, indexing is slow, banning users is hugely time consuming and complicated, usergroup permissions are messed up. And thats just what I could think of off the top of my head. It would probably cost $100k to have a team of people build everything we need on top of SMF, but again we would face the issue of what to do when its time to upgrade something. The goal is to have a new software that can easily be upgraded and expanded upon whenever we need.
As a member here, this forum seems fine enough. People are happy to complain about avatars or the trust system or whatever minor changes they would like, but the forums is in dire need of a complete overhaul. Is $1.5m too much, perhaps, but if we get $1.5m worth of forum then its money well spent.