So more Bitcoin companies should be involved in development? It's funny that Conformal Systems did exactly that, and gets no recognition from Gavin or any of the other core developers for their contributions.

Unlike BitPay which made a big deal of supporting the community via Jeff Garzik's 2000 LOC, Conformal put the development of their actual business on hold for a year while they wrote a clean slate reimplementation of the reference implementation as an open source donation to the community.

Fortunately, they're about done with that so now they can focus on their Coinvoice service. I say fortunately because that means they've had time to help out two local merchants in Austin that got burned by BitPay. (Do you know how embarrassing it is to go around to local merchants convincing them to start accepting Bitcoin and pointing them at the most well-known Bitcoin payment processor just to have them run into existential problems like "not getting paid?")