lol!

to your point about it being monolithic: after having my devs collectively spend several man years rebuilding bitcoin from scratch (starting in late feb 2013), even having bitcoind as a reference, it's still not finished. there are myriad new features proposed in ETH that all have to be tested before they are released. i suspect that even with a pile of VC money, say >USD 10M, you would be hard-pressed to get all these features coded, tested and added.

while bitcoin is itself relatively complex code-wise, its fundamental insight is rather simple - "use proof of work as both (1) a distributed timestamp and (2) a minting/reward mechanism". if you take 10 such insights, roll them into one, then try to hack out the code, you will soon be in over your head.