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.
What you write could not be more true, although people on bct seem to ONLY care about the fanciness of the GUI. The question arises if we want to please users on bct or not. I'd say no, because Iota will not become widely used by bct users speculating, but by real world IoT usage.
The problem is that some Iota ICO investors are not very tech savy and would not be able to move funds around without a simple GUI. The interface is almost done, so it will get released anyway.
What we need are more proof of concepts, tinkerers, project devs, businesses implementing Iota etc.
I'm very optimistic that we'll get that once the tangle get's released into the wild.
If not, I'll definitely put up some bounties for good proof of concepts.