No.  You don't need SJ.  He's doing his job, much like any decent escrow company: nag and push and demand deadlines or explanations of delays and recommend solutions to both parties.  That money is under him and up to the phase 2 investors to discuss with him. When word is bond is job, SJ has a right to be more tightfisted than my Depression-Era grandmother with a riot outside her pottery stall, so don't expect to drag him out.  Move on.

You need an interim plan right now.

You have ~60BTC (@USD575 = USD34,500 = my first annual salary) under your own control.  Take these steps:
1. Pay all remaining bounties, i.e. signature campaign;
2. Get a qt wallet out for public download;
3. Issue coins and set up the mining pools, rigs, dev funds etc.
4. Code the OCaml wallet and project map the debit card.  A benighted, full-fledged, oversized Gantt chart in Microsoft Project format of a project plan at that.  Dates, crunch periods, resource allocation, all that stuff.
5. After all the above, send the debit card project plans to SJ for negotiation.

The last thing your investors or doubters should have to see is the Opair team attempt to justify their earlier escrow stance by calling out SJ to agree to plans.  Hell, as a team you're lucky he even dealt with you with as few details as you provided publicly.