when i was working on a bitcoin fork called parallelcoin, i built out a whole upgrade for the protocol including a hardfork mechanism, totally redesigned block schedule and difficulty adjustment, and a GUI interface for the wallet and controller

i did most of the work, a little of it was done by my colleague, but it took about 2 years and was early alpha by the end of that period

i think that this is a typical timeline for a decentralised, crowd-sourced protocol as well, i think that nostr is still alpha, mid alpha even, because there is a lot of easy improvements to the protocol at this point that haven't happened yet but many are working in parallel on various parts of it

i think 3 years is how long it takes to get to beta, for a full blown protocol, for one developer to build a system out

there is almost no teams doing dev for nostr, maybe only damus and primal, almost everything else is one man bands, so this kinda dictates the timeline, and part of the reason is that we still don't have an optimal mechanism for sharing our specifications and deciding on how to settle differences between them, it's still hard to even find new proposed ones because there isn't even a convention for how to mark the name of a nip-proposal in the PRs of the nips repo, and some devs have already raced ahead (Stella and her crew, Pablo, and some others) making a wiki protocol, which will sooner or later do it, once enough people get fed up with how slowly the governance is working on the github nips repo

here's the thing:

this is a decentralised protocol

you don't need permission to try something

really you just need relay and client devs working closer together