I've written some code over the years myself and my biggest concern is a very short period of time in which you guys have managed to put together so much. If I understand you correctly you and two of your friends came together just 2 months ago and start brainstorming some ideas. And then two months later you have all of the above mostly complete and you did it in C.
I must say you seem a lot like Superman, Batman and Spiderman united. Could you comment on that please?
BR
First of all, "I've written some code over the years myself" -> That sounds like you're a hobbyist at best, not somebody who should be nit picking on this subject.
I can comment on this for the NEONs team… Have you seen NXT's source code? It's only like 7k lines of code (I realize a little bit of it's missing). I sometimes write that much in a day. This is 3 people working on something for 2 months straight. If there were 3 of me, I could probably knock out 2-3 cryptos in two months and have at least one decent client with UI. It's not like they have to develop everything from scratch like Satoshi did… Most of what they're doing is just improving and modifying existing designs. For an experienced programmer, translating design between languages is not a complicated task.
Furthermore, the task of creating a crypto is not exactly gargantuan. It's just a protocol, and ALL of the clients usually suck. If the clients were great in terms of UI, I might agree that 2 months isn't enough time. Having said that, they're not... Nobody (except third-party companies) has spent any "real" time developing great UI for crypto clients. All the alt coins use that QT software, which is like a one-size-fits-all system. That's why there are bugs among and some variations between the different versions - windows, mac, linux, etc. And NXT's client isn't even really a client. You have to launch terminal or command prompt, then access a port on your localhost via your browser. It's basically just a cheesy website. That wouldn't take long to make at all. There are like 5 things you can even do when using it, definitely not an overly intricate or time consuming project.
I wasn't actually referring to any kind of UI as it is obviously the least important part of the architecture from the conceptual point of view.
The list of features is still quite long though but time frame not so much. If you count architectural design and planing, coding, redesigning when you find out something hasn't been thought through well and the consequent code refactoring, testing and bug fixing then its still impressive pice of work to pull off in two months even by three guys and very well distributed work plan. I'm not saying it's impossible it's just impressive. It's just a protocol yes.