As marky said, the amount of money was based around the time the contract developer (@lightproject) spent developing it. Whether it was developed effectively or not, no-one outside can asses because the code is closed-source, only the development results per day are known.

But as it should be pretty clear by now: time spent developing the project !== value generated by the project

If the price would have been based around the value it provides, it would have been FAR less if you compare the actual results, not the potential results somewhere in the future.

Basically, in my opinion, jackmiller should have never paid lightproject before any results were known and lightproject should have never requested such high payments without known results via proof-of-concept and the community should have decided whether it would be worth it to continue working on it.

Because at this point, Hive and its reputation are on the losing end for giving money naively to a project without PoC, not jackmiller who miscalculated the impact the project would have but still got a full refund for what he paid - and it's not some "pocketchange" which could justify an "oops, sorry - I'm out".

If this is the message we want Hive to bring outside to the world aka. "come to hive, pitch some crazy idea, develop some version of a product, sack in the money, never take responsibility for what happens next" then I doubt legitimate people/projects will have an incentive to put their reputation on the line building here.