it kinda sux that the rewards have been private members only till now
It is not correct. The project has been
announced at cyberc0n almost 1 year ago (please keep in mind that the distribution from this presentation has been significantly changed based on the community feedback). Access to validator set was available for everybody since euler-1, every bit of decision has been discussed in #fuckgoogle at telegram. Those who participated last year in euler-4 have rewards in the form of 0.27% of Genesis for supporting the network which is not significant but really important for guys who invested into bootstrap.
github public
IMHO to be "github public" has more grassroots than "bitcointalk public". To be honest I did not want to post on the bitcointalk because I saw how bloated and scamy it become. So I wanted to attract real engineers first. Sorry for that.