Thanks for the historical info, @jill and @kshitij. After a brief perusal I can see there’s a lot of valuable info there. I’ll try and propose something that skirts the pains of the past, while also trying to soften the pains of the present.
Chief in my mind right now, though, is that the LabXchange project seems to have been from the start what I’m thinking of - first as a subteam in Serenity, then later as Falcon, for all intents and purposes a LabXchange “project cell”, where the epic and client were owned by @usman, who then managed a dedicated team of something between 4 and 6 developers.
To my eye (correct me if I’m wrong) it was doing fine right up until the LX budget was cut, Usman announced he was leaving, and members started to have to diversify: at this point the burdens of having to tackle different projects raised the overhead to a point that started burning people out, which made the problem worse and worse.
Also in my mind is the time I spent as a temporary contractor working in the Serenity/LabXchange subteam (before it became Falcon). For many months I got to spend all my time focused on coding in the same codebase, which made me a very efficient and happy codemonkey. No management except of my own time, little client communication, and only a ticket or two to worry about every sprint. Sure, there were periods of stress (particularly close to v1 delivery), and Usman will certainly raise that it was anything but easy, but that’s just a fact of life in software development. I look back upon that time as my best at OpenCraft.
The point is that I’d like to see if this can be made possible for all core members that want it. From the looks of it, most of us would enjoy it as much as I did.