I agree that some things are shady as you said, but you went too far IMO. First it was always clearly stated that the project is ShadowCashe fork. When I say always I mean since jbg over took the lead. First group of developers obviously took coins (approx. 20k $ IIRC) for few hours of work. Changed the name, not sure what else has happened, and what I find strange here is that despite that many ICO holders still defend these people and say 'they were paid to deliver the first wallet, or to do initial work'. Maybe they are just afraid of bad publicity?

Now, regarding jbg, he actually mentioned that the reason the project has no whitepaper is because not enough code changes have been implemented (compared to ShadowCashe code base) to justify new whitepaper, which is thus expected with version 2 of the wallet which should bring stealth staking.

Further I would like to stress the fact that writing code is not the only job for a developer, especialy in projects where security or reliability are so important. Code inspection is very, very important, and jbg also had to spend a lot of time to familiarize him self with the ShadowCashe project/code base. From my conversations with him, my personal, subjective estimation is that he is enough capable, and knowledgeable for this kind of work.

The fact that he updates libraries, such as the Tor network, is a good sign that he cares about security. If one compares it to other projects like DO and Verge, the situation with XSPEC is much better. DO run until recently on a very vulnerable Tor code from 2014.

How I see things is that exactly because project is in this particular phase/state, there could be much potential in it, and money is anyway the main reason most of people buy/hold coins. Big money usually comes with greater risk.

Monero was also called scam at the beginning, and who knows, maybe it was. But its founder recognized the potential the project had and decided to invest in it. I hope same will happen with XSPEC.

I also don't think that amount of money collected with donations has been spent wisely, or very well, but that is up to jbg and community to decide how much they want to give, and for what. XSPEC would definitely profit from new developers, and IMO this step is necessary for the project further advancement.