I understand your point Jan, I remember you telling about your main job since 2009. I also remember if not confused that you sort of bounded with others (partners) to lighter your site weight from your shoulders, maybe I am wrong (it is just what I vaguely remember … I also believe with ALL the effort you have invested and the “great results”, that your extensions/site should pay you a fair/earned decent life, and not needing to work on something else, of course only if you really like it
… but mainly what you have should give you “as a great project” all the resources needed to invest into development).
At any case, prioritizing is a most for you (until you have the resources (not necessarily money, but also man hrs. contributions) for development) at this moment and I totally agree with you on the way you are planning your future.
However I still do not plan to move into J3.x, and for sure want to keep phoca gallery as my main image manager (happily using it for over 4 years now). I suggest another option: We are talking specifically about “phoca gallery smart search J2.5 plugin”, not overwriting all your extensions.
What if you manage another coder to work on this task and I pay for him as my donation to Phoca?
I am not a coder myself, but I know some good coders that we could invite to work, I am sure you also know some people that could be of great help. Even on this same forum you have coder users that may want to participate. We could call this a way to empower your community, to allow us pay for development
You know better than anyone how much in time and effort every task should cost on man hrs, just put a price to them, publish the whole list of task with prices and allow coders and volunteers to participate.
Hope you like the idea.