Hello! There’s a lot of points raised here, and I want to address them as best I can.
To address @ckie’s main question, Hoot isn’t scope creep: we needed a way to get Spritely’s applications to the everyday user. It’s been in our plans since early on to have an answer to getting Spritely to desktop, mobile, and browser users. We knew we had to work on a solution, but we actually expected that the start on that work would be on 1-2 years from when Hoot initially got funded. So what you’ve seen through the funding aspect is that when we talked to the folks at Metamask about funding possibilities, we laid out our roadmap, and Hoot was what they were excited to fund, so it got accelerated. (This funding is not work-for-hire and is not tied to any blockchain technology.) But this is really exciting and in retrospect a big relief, because it means that one of the biggest looming questions is being addressed early: we have a path to reach a much wider audience, and that path is the browser!
That said, I understand how it’s confusing. As @parnikkapore points out, the older https://spritelyproject.org/ website may have been confusing for many users, but did have a roadmap. However that website dated from when Spritely was primary a solo project by me. We have a new roadmap which has been established internally since the Spritely Institute has been founded in January 2022. Making this roadmap more public and visible is in the works; we are will be including it in our website revamp in 2024.
Regarding the question of “what is the Agency supposed to be”? The Agency is a name for the peer-to-peer user agent that Spritely will be giving to users. “Client” doesn’t make as much sense because our user-facing application won’t be client-server. The term Agency is a term from the Electric Communities name for the same thing.
Now to rewind, back to the why Hoot is actually a great fit for Spritely’s roadmap: when it came to delivering our Agency to users, we had viewed a lot of different approaches internally: having different implementations in different languages (that’s a high maintenance burden), having different frontends for different platforms (still a high maintenance burden), or somehow getting our code into the browser. The WebAssembly GC proposal looked like it was going to land at the perfect time… and indeed it has! We are very pleased that nightly builds of major browsers are able to run Hoot-generated code. This cuts a huge amount of work off of Spritely’s plate by doing Hoot up front, at the expense of having the effort done much earlier than expected. That the Metamask folks (who are also big object capability security fans, that’s the other connection) were excited about Hoot as a project and to see Spritely’s tech in the browser in general meant that this was being resolved much, much sooner. We’re all very proud of it and thrilled we got to work on it so early.
I hope that answers your all’s questions!