Our primary goal is to create a program that gets beginners interested and attracts those miners not using ASICs, and delivers that mining experience with enhanced power and ease of use.
I don't think you understand. When the ASICs come out,
no one will be running GPU miners anymore, since they will have a very
very small fraction of the mining power they have today. There will be
no difference between your mining program, and a program designed to destroy video cards.
Why would you and a team waste time programming this?
While our over-arching goal is to provide the mining program to the Bitcoin community... we're also trying to get an A here. We're programming students and this is one of our larger projects, part of which is to procure funding.
Because of this requirement, we figured we'd get a loan from the Bitcoin community, buy some computers to use and return, and then pay it back with a little on top. I hope by now no one thinks we're trying to rip anyone off. We just want to get the ball rolling so we can develop the product, pay back our loans, and release the program.
And while it is all for a grade, we're really serious and dedicated to what we've decided to pursue. Bitcoin and digital currencies in general are often severely underrepresented in computer science curriculums, so we're trying to publicize, educate, and release a great piece of software. Our target market isn't composed of Bitcoin gurus like yourself; rather, we're aimed at those individuals who, for whatever reason, prefer to use a mining client over an ASIC.
You're certainly raising valid points, but our goals are simple and clean and we hope other people see that as well.