They also have different programming styles. Satoshi was an old school C++ programmer. BCNext was a Java programmer who didn't follow standard programming conventions (i.e. he put the whole code in a single file with no comments and no of additional libraries). Qora's code was also written in Java but is comparatively well organized and commented.
I'm not sure if I buy the first two.
University/corporate educated engineers are all taught to develop for MAINTAINABILITY...
To develop clear, structured, modular code so THE NEXT GUY can easily maintain and expand the code.
You cannot graduate from university or hold down a corporate job...
Without developing HIGHLY maintainable code... it's really 90% of the ballgame.
Satoshi was not "old school", but self-taught and not a professional...
Because he wrote some of the most opaque and unmaintanable code ever produced...
Which has been a big drag on Bitcoin for 5 years to this day... as has been the C code base.
I'm sure BCNext code was of much better quality, regardless of what the core looked like...
But it was his original, confident design that was at genius level...
Which allowed other coders to easily take over and quickly add feature after feature to this day....
No platform has ever been developed faster and been more robust than NXT...
Which is a tribute to both BCNext and Java.
BCNext was a long time member of this place, so the Feds must know who he is...
He also posted a "let's do Silk Road 2" thread here weeks before the Nxt ANN thread...
So NXT was really designed to host illicit markets... and this haunted BCNext until he disappeared.
A lot of people in the NXT community think he is still around and working on stuff.
It's interesting that NXT hit 0.00003 or about $10 million on Dec 21, 2013...
And that's pretty much where it is today
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/on-nxt-coin-price-boom-from-00001-to-00003-seems-like-a-scam-input-here-379681