I know you catch a lot of flack on here; however, I personally think you think that you have many valid points. Despite that, I don't think that many of the obstacles you propose will make much of a difference to something like Canopy. In that respect I side with the ridiculers if you will :)
I liken it to observing Apple's ascent to an extremely profitable electronics/computer maker from the introduction of the iMac and then iPhone and onward. What's notable is that as a tech geek and computer nerd (me, with the analogy being that you yourself are steeped in pot culture) I thought Apple's stuff was always inferior. Growing up with the open ecosystem of PC stuff, and then the rise of the open and somewhat anarchic web made me think that Apple was just a toy, a pretty one, but a toy. Not modular, not user configurable, a closed ecosystem etc. When they moved from their own chips to Intel they actually lost a lot of their 'rock stable' reliability too and for several iteration of the OS had to work to get it back. Yet they actually doubled down on the closed ecosystem approach (think App Store, iTunes, whatever their mnusic label thing is called). And they profited massively. People like a nice package. They like things neat and marketed and sanitized. They really do. As much as the grassroots sees it as obvious that an 'organic' approach is correct, it is often not the one that wins out.
Just my thoughts.
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