We spent over three years planning and building IOL 2 with dozens upon dozens of full-time programmers, architects, QA people, business analysts, project managers, and more. The size and scope of this project amazes me even now. There will NOT be another new platform any time soon, believe me. IOL 2 was built with a solid underlying architecture that was designed to scale, and to be honest, I personally doubt there ever will be a "true" IOL 3: Anything with that name would likely just be a facelift or extension or variation on IOL 2, and would still use the same underlying database architecture, code structure, processing logic, and server organization, because we did all of that right this time around. I wouldn't be surprised if most of IOL 2's code outlives me. So that's the silver lining on these dark clouds: I doubt we'll ever go through this again. (And thank God for that.)
Speaking in my role as one of the lead UI developers, that was kinda the point. Flash and glitz is stupid. We could add it, I suppose, but the only thing that does is look good on marketing brochures. I don't want shiny lights and big wasteful displays on my software. I want power. I want control. I want the machine to do what I tell it when I tell it to do that and do it now and not ask questions and get the heck out of my way the rest of the time. And that's probably what you want too. Our focus in building IOL 2 wasn't on pretty — although I think the UI is fairly pleasant to look at — but on making the core of it solid, right, and stable, and I think that's the right focus to have had. Anybody can draw a pretty web page.
