Thanks, Scott - I was thinking up something like this, but you said it better. Only love of this project will move it forward. It was never an open project, and the sickness in this community is a carry over from its history. The dream of creating revenue from SME (at least directly) is a high risk, low probability adventure.
Where we differ, perhaps, is in outlook.
It may be difficult to make money with SME, but that doesn't change whether or not we need it. It isn't contribs.org that needs the money, it's the community that needs the money, if we want the distro to survive. IMO, if we try to move the project again at this point, we might as well shoot it and get it over with. We've had too much attrition already.
While I appreciate the idea of a leader, a central point to rally around, set priorities, etc., we don't need a savior, we've had too many already. I think that's just a continuation of the 'sickness': "Build an active and attractive project and distro for me, so I can use it without effort or worry about the future. By the way, I need SME to support file transfer to flash memory cards over USB 2.0, with format conversion to FAT32. Thanks." That's half the 'sickness' in a nutshell: it was never an open project, we were peripheral to it, it didn't matter, really, whether we "gave anything back" or not, so we got used to getting SME for free, like "free beer". We felt entitled to regular updates, and became aggravated if they were too long in coming. A few champions regularly pitched in (and were sometimes castigated for trespass), but the majority of us (me, too) just let it happen. I think we're starting to come out of the coma now, but you can still see the symptoms everywhere. We're still saying "Somebody must do something" instead of "I'm going to do X". Even when we volunteer to help, we want someone to tell us what to do, and get angry if no one does.
The other half (of the 'sickness') is that most of us (me, too), whatever we may desire, do not have the skills to contribute to the core distro in any meaningful way, and we let it stop us from contributing at all. A few months back, a news item was posted that said approx 7% of the hits on contribs.org were from Linux OS's. Most of the rest were no doubt from windows boxes, and this probably reflects the community well: 90% windows users. This is a fundamental issue with the distro, after all. SME is not so wonderful to someone who could build a server from source, with all the functionality desired, in a long Saturday afternoon. We love it, frankly, because it lets us put Linux to good use without having to do the hard work to understand all the details. We learn by doing.
So let's quit calling it 'sickness', and call it 'ignorance' instead. We're not used to open-source projects, and tend to think they exist in order to give us free software. The commercial element confuses our goals, and dilutes our efforts. We don't have the skills for all the hard work that has been/needs to be done. We need money to survive, but don't seem to have any good way to come up with it. What's a mother to do?
Whatever she can, of course! The same news item said contribs.org gets 1.8 million hits a month from 48k visitors. Without getting hung up on the accuracy of those numbers, that's a lot of interest in a supposedly stagnant and uncompetitive distro, more than enough to do what needs to be done. Each of us do our piece, and we just have to hope that it adds up to be enough. Don't kid yourself that your input is useless. We are the saviors of SME, the champions and evangelists, the admins and developers and leaders. Look around. Who else is there but each other?
This project is not stagnant: several grand folks have stepped up to help just in the last few days - just for the love of it. Several more have been working all along; in the forums, in bug tracker, on security - just for the love of it. The contribs team has sweated bullets to create and repair this site - just for the love of it. A number of folks have given money - just for the love of it. We (all of us) are still here. We just need to step it up a notch.
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