It is indeed hard. Because Nostr is a rare opportunity for developers to work on their own. Many developers are simply here to hack and have fun. A few are working on it with an entrepreneur ambition and efficient execution. 

But still, the current capittal utilization of Nostr, or simply OpenSats, is much higher than any VC. The 5M is not fully spent yet. No VC can support such a wide range of projects with just 5M.

Nostr is not a single app where as Bluesky, as a single app, raised 8M in its seed.

Therefore, it's not an apples to apples comparison. Most Nostr projects, be it a client or server, receives less than 0.05M funding. 160X less money!

As far as I know, the whole Nostr ecosystem only has 6M so far, that is 1M to primal and 5M to OpenSats for 20+ projects. 

 Apps wouldn’t need to bow out or merge if more was invested into libraries. 

Could consolidate on a a few libraries rather than a few apps 

 Gossip would not have come so far so fast if we had to rely on pull requests to a library maintained by a different author.  We've had to fork several upstream projects as well (egui, speedy) because it would be far too difficult to get our changes upstream.

I think as things have settled down, the calculation has changed. But now the problem is merging or switching libraries is a huge undertaking with no benefit to the end-user. 

 We also did our nostr implementation from scratch for nos. Honestly that wasn’t the hard part.  

 Oh the UI is the hard part? 

 Too soon to coalesce and start compromising on developers’ visions