From a software development perspective, Epochtalk had a massive scope.
It aimed to replace software such as the one this forum runs on, which on its turn is based on decades of collective knowledge and thousands of manhours by a very wide array of people that contributed to the SMF open source project.

The Epochtalk team was small. Not much is known about the people that were part of the development team. However, since the very inception of the project, many members of the bitcoin community were quick to point out that they seemingly were too young and seemingly lacked previous experience. It's easy to substantiate these conclusions given the fact that the developers, to their credit, use their real profiles on GitHub.

At the time of the team got the project, these developers would have been around 25 years old. Many had said that choosing such a team for a project with the goals Epochtalk was unacceptable. At the time, the budget was huge for how small bitcoin was as a whole, so it was a big deal. Eventually it got hard to follow this discourse because it got lumped together with the blocksize debate/crisis the bitcoin community was getting through around that time.

But focusing on Epochtalk's fate, now with the eventual announcement that the plug will be pulled from supporting its development after so long, even more questions arise. Looking back, I'm afraid we now have to admit that those expressing concern with how the project was handled were right.

The question of why this specific team was picked, and based on what criteria it was decided to support them continuing work on the project remain.

It appears that a large portion of the bitcointalk's community donation funds went toward this software's development. These were funds that were initially donated and held to the forum with the goal of improving bitcoin and its community.

This remains one of the hardest subjects that concerns this community. The failure to deliver the new forum software, while no longer a hot topic after all these years, surely deserves a revisit to these old questions.