Again I think the heart of it for me personally is that felt Monero doesn't really own anything, other than its own (perhaps smaller than Bitcoin's rather small) community and its refined implementation. In the sense that Python owns its syntax. If you create a JPython you are still helping Python. If you create a BitcoinJ, you are still helping Bitcoin. This is what I meant when I wrote the ecosystem was a "clusterfuck" (or let's say non-ideal). We had developers and communities fighting each other on the same protocol. It felt like copycoins vs. Bitcoin, except in this case none of them were the first and legitimate one.
Yes, that's what happens when you build something and try to launch it with a fraudulent 82% premine, a fake backstory, and an army of shills trying to make it appear popular and established. A clusterfuck. So that is (or more accurately was) a fair characterization, but not one of any of our making, and one that Monero has attempted (with a fair degree of success) to replace with a vibrant and successful community.
I disagree with your last sentence though. Monero is indeed the first legitimate cryptonote coin, which was launched as a minimal fork for the sole reason of getting rid of the fraudulent premine. (Also worth noting that the public face of the cryptonote team welcomed and invited forks, and even released a "coin fork creation kit";
https://cryptonotestarter.org)
Monero has always been a fully public open source project where everyone including the original developers has been (and continue to be) welcome to contribute. For all we know, some of the original developers (who are anonymous, as are many Monero contributing developers)
have contributed. We know, for example, that during the chain fork attack last year, the cryptonote group sent a fix (though the community had already by that time developed one anyway).
One of the signs of leadership is being able to get everyone working together.
You can't necessarily ever get
everyone working together. Nevertheless a great many people are indeed working together a year later, and that should say something about the leadership. When you count the core developers, contributing developers to the core project, people working on Monaro-related businesses such as MyMonero and Crypto-Kingdom, mining pools, various independent developers and other significant projects (such as the new Android mobile wallet) there are at least several dozen actual developers working on various aspects of it, along with many non-developers contributing in their own ways too.
I will leave to others whether that constitutes good leadership, but my opinion should be fairly obvious.
I find it interesting how most coins only have 1 primary developer (and often fail when/if that developer leaves) and some coins have many people developing. Did some/most of these developers come to Monero on their own? Or were they invited to Monero from existing developers whom they already new?
Do you have any tips for attracting (or keeping) developers? Specifically for new coins that do not have much if any funding yet.
Bitcoin I can understand as most core developers were early adopters and have a vested interest in the project.
Now that bitcoin has been relatively well established (compared to all other coins) it seems that most new development is going into supporting services and infrastructure instead of bitcoin itself. Do you see that as a pattern that will be repeated with other coins (that developers who come along after a coin has been established will be more interested in building supporting services instead of working on the core itself)?