I won't say anything about those developers as we already know that after getting payment of around $5.9M they still weren't able to create Epochtalk, I believe whatever they created for that amount could be created by a small team for much less amount.

Well, I believe Theymos took a good decision by halting that Epochtalk project as investing more money into a project like that is somehow waste of money.

I agree with the sheriff, PowerGlove is the one to consider as paid developer if that's even needed to improve the current forum instead of moving to in-house built forum software from scratch. As far as I know the guy has really helped the forum a lot by regularly patching it. Thumbs up for PowerGlove!