Valarmg - your questions are important and I'm glad it's you who brings them up, as someone who has been following MGW development since we started and is not currently included in the picture.
t3CLtd is doing a lot of important organizational work on slack, principally to get the most solid and accessible SuperNET v1 GUI possible. The new MGW code, integrated in SuperNET, is becoming the backbone for this GUI due to its flexibility. This of course asks for stable service and committed operation team; he understands that one issue with MGW operation so far has been no incentives, other than contributing to the service and keeping things running as they evolve. Gains as MGW operator in the long run have been, so far, unknown, and you can hardly expect people to spend serious time monitoring and operating every day if MGW does not help pay their bills.
I haven't participated in the design of the funding plan, so I cannot address points 1 or 3. I understand evaluation of work done will not be only made by James or t3CLtd. It should also take into consideration the perspective of other team members, although you can hardly include the general sNET community as a judge because a lot of the work happens behind the scenes. As far as I am concerned I won't take any payments unless other people in the team believe my work deserves it.
Since I've been working these previous months also to defend the interests of operators, at least to get operation costs covered and server costs funded when requested, I'm well aware that t3CLtd's proposal raised concerns in some of them. Does this mean existing clusters, i.e. production servers (MGW#0) and team Starbuck (MGW#1) do not appear in the SuperNET picture of MGW? And if they do, what are the terms?
I hope to keep current operators included in this picture as long as they are interested and they are able to dedicate the required time. This is, no significant delays can happen because operators are not available. Now there may be also the possibility of having more than one server cluster providing gateway for the same coin, which could be handled by the GUI according to cluster reliability, or user input in advanced GUI.
Since James is refining the new database MGW being tested, we'll also know very soon how many coins can be handled smoothly by a node in the latest version. Then we can follow different options, depending on what testing shows.
a) The new nodes deployed in SuperNET (MGW#2) operate the sNET-integrated coins (VRC, OPAL, Bitstar, VPN and also BTCD), and existing clusters update their software and provide gateway for the coins they've managed so far (BTC in MGW#0, DOGE/BC in MGW#1)
b) The new nodes/software are able to provide gateway for all the coins, and existing clusters can be eventually upgraded and join the sNET nodes as additional gateways.
There might be other options. This will be decided according to testing results on the latest SuperNET/MGW software changes James is working in. Then (and it has to be soon) we can finish the picture, and see if/how it affects this funding plan at all.