No, I'm not gone. Not completely at least, but I was getting close to it.
(The next part is an explanation/rant of my situation. I'm not speaking directly about anyone and I'm not trying to incite any hurt feelings. Just putting my thoughts down. I also am not looking for praise or any of that crap. I'm just one part of the community and the community deserves to know where I stand.)
In the last couple of months, it's become very hard to justify working on this phone. There's numerous reasons (for me) as to why:
1) School - I'm a full-time college student.
2) The phone itself - Besides the fact that I don't use the phone, the hardware itself doesn't seem very capable.
3) Lack of knowledge - I'm not a developer. Never have been, never will be. I only know how to code in Python (only the OTA packaging tools are written in Python).
4) Relationship with the community - This is the biggest thing for me and I'll explain this more fully.
I got fed up with the Ascend community. I went ahead and shut down my Twitter because it became another option for people to bitch at me. The bug tracker was taken down because I never once received a real bug report. I never once got an ADB logcat output so I can see the true error, research the error and potentially come up with a fix. Furthermore, people were so arrogant/greedy that they didn't even take the time to read the other reports before filing their own. This led to numerous duplicates of useless reports. I asked Pip to end my involvement in the bug tracker, but I guess he was fed up too, so he closed it down completely.
While I don't consider myself a developer, I understand that problems do arise. People are expecting someone to produce the fix. (This is why open-source sucks sometimes). This is the nature of software development. The one thing I noticed about the Ascend community is there aren't any real developers. The work that I did was a culmination of 7 months of research. I didn't do anything differently than what any other Ascend user could of done. I researched other projects, tinkered, figure out what did what and put it together. This is what frustrated me. Everything boiled down to a one-man mission with everyone looking for a miracle fix. When all I did was Google. There's a wealth of information out there and tools to find it. Use them.
Working on CM7-Ascend became a tedious job, instead of being the cool hobby it used to be. It literally became the old "give people an inch, they take a mile" scenario. Not the whole community, however. There were users who were like, "holy s*@!, man thanks for the effort." People, like me, who couldn't believe Gingerbread 2.3 was on the Ascend! But mostly, it was just users who were complaining about useless things. This all plays into how young this community is. I don't mean this age-wise. For most Ascend users, this is their first Android. They've never participated in an open-source project and it's still amazing to them that all this can be free. But while it might be free to you, it is never free to the developer. And pride plays a big part too. You invest time into a project and it stings when people insult it. Even when you know they can't really do any better. I really should of known better as this ain't my first rodeo, but it's definitely made me think about the open-source philosophy. (Which most people still don't understand, even most Linux users).
On a positive note, the cool people were really cool. I mean that. The coolest of the cool. Especially those who fill the gaps that I couldn't here on the forums. Also, my sources are still up. If I were so inclined, I could easily pull my sources, merge upstream crap and keep going. (I'd have to reinstall Ubuntu as I wiped my dev laptop already). Oh and those wanting to get the Ascend officially supported, I wouldn't. You have to go through a review process to make changes to the official version. Sometimes it's just better to fly off the radar. I probably just need a break to recharge and I'll settle back into CM7-Ascend. If this was tl;dr crap I'm sorry.
Happy Ascending.
Good luck in whatever it is you do my friend! Hope to see you soon.