I wrote a fairly complete API (minus attacking/spying) back in like 2011 for the purposes of AI bots. It was never really used for whatever reason and it became broken as other things were changed. qz fixed it up recently to work with his other major changes so that's cool. :)

IMO, there's not a huge amount of value in writing a straight up app for EE unless it's for in-app purchases and stuff like that. The major gains of writing an app don't really apply to EE because it's text based. Forking the UI codebase sounds like a maintenance headache compared to doing a web container app with a responsive HTML5/CSS3 UI.

Related to other developers... we've been burned a lot by that in the past ("skilled" people professing to want to help.... then abusing their access) so we're pretty jaded, to be perfectly honest. I know there are good developers out there in this community but I'm personally very hesitant about that sort of stuff at this stage. I worry another such incident will sour me and qz for the final time. :(

But I like Marshal's idea too. Everyone buy gems before you FS! :D