It's how the cycle works when you're a serious project. People have become accustomed to ICO scams full of promises and hype, without much substance. Decred's development activity has been unusually active in the background when compared to other projects. A little while ago I calculated the number of pull requests (collections of code) finalised and merged into Decred's core repositories and it was well over 2,000 since launch. Now that's a weak statistic to base development quality on, but it shows serious activity.

Anyone familiar with the codebase itself can attest to its quality. I would imagine that's why the upstream project (same developers, same core codebase) received praise from the Lightning Network this year: "Our Bitcoin library of choice is btcsuite, the very set of libraries that powers btcd, the full-node implementation which is also written in pure-golang."

If the same code and effort that went into Decred is good enough for them, I'd say we're on the right track. Especially considering the great major milestones on the updated roadmap:

• Public proposal system
• Stakeholder-directed DAO
• Lightning Network
• Enhanced user privacy

Having said all that, it takes particularly skilled people to recognise this and read between the lines.