Glad to hear about all of the fund shifting going around and the new "old" GUI.
This morning I was thinking about all of this and I was about ready to speak up and say that we need to completely stop focusing on getting a UI. Yes, it makes sense in the early days for testing but Iota is for IoT. Any IoT device that will need some form of UI will need to implement it itself. If it uses Iota, it will have to have it's own variation of a transaction interface, specific to the device.
The IRI is just to get the ball rolling and we must keep that perspective. Iota is way to ambitious to be put in the standard cryptocurrency box of just a coin with some form of wallet UI. It's not a cryptocurrency. It's a token-based transaction system for the IoT and with 0-fee messaging, it could become the communications protocol for millions of devices.
Point.
However the GUI can be beneficial in some ways -
1. Proof of concept for humans (zero fees, tangle vs. blockchain etc.)
2. Listing on exchanges so as to have an entry point for IOT enthusiasts to acquire some tokens for their pet projects.
3. Even though IOTA is IOT centric, i am not convinced (with my admittedly tiny understanding of the tech) that there will be no benefits of a zero-fee distributed ledger system for err.. human nodes shall we say. Of course, the architecture is designed with machines in mind (not all nodes seeing same tangle state at a given time, non-reusable addresses, non-enforceable tip selection algorithms, etc. etc.)
I mean we are talking about bitcoin-like properties without fees and scalability issues.
That in itself, is big enough to make people wonder.
Edit: Just a concluding thought, i think IOTA could very well be the bridge between the machines/sensors/AI economy and the human economy. Seamless interfacing on both ends, forming a mutually supportive and beneficial ecosystem.