Hi Chris,
It is great to hear that you are using Moose to serve a larger audience. Could you give us details about your use case?
Thanks for raising this issue. Moose is indeed a platform for productive developers, and it will remain so. It is precisely because we want to keep our tools "well conceived" that we need to drop things along the way. EyeSee was started 7 years ago, and at least in the past years it did not see any significant development. A similar story happened with Mondrian (first built in 2005 and dropped last year) and the same will happen with Roassal (to be replaced by Roassal2).
An interesting thing to notice is that even after so many hundred man years of effort, Moose still has only 200k lines of code (and it is about 50k too large right now). This quite remarkable if you think about how the capabilities increased dramatically over the last years. The only way we can reach this is by continuously reinventing the core parts to build slimmer and more expressive models.
It is for this reason that people building things on top should raise their voice every time they think an analysis is not elegant or not concise enough. I know this takes energy, but Moose has the ambitious goal of redefine development and analysis tools and we have to focus on that goal. It might sound bombastic but I am confident that we are approaching a tipping point. We just have to keep pushing.
Cheers,
Doru