I think the dynamics you touched upon are specific to coderwall, their revenue model, their leadership, and their choice of stack(not that any of it is bad, it has just created the situation you described), and you can't judge every startup/product/team on assembly through the same lens. Only a few of the products on assembly are profitable at this time, the majority of things are in idea stage, and I think those projects are the ones where one can get the most value for their work. Of course there is the risk that the product is never completed or turns a profit, but that's all startups.
Startup ideas laying around I plan to put up there once I've got the ball rolling on my current ones: http://transtartup.blogspot.com
Assembly will prove valuable if people create value for the ideas put there on the risk that it will pay off, and the smaller the team when the dev gets in, the bigger of an impact and stake they can have/be rewarded.
I've got a few products on Assembly and have some thoughts to share. I think Assembly has a shot at a product that makes revenue by helping startups/products/teams navigate the pain points you described. You specified their business model. It is incredibly difficult, but that's why it's worth paying for. CPA and regulatory compliance as a service. I think it should function to VC's as project greenlight does to steam, a platform to get started and build traction on before getting called up to the big leagues. It needs a lot of work, a top to bottom rethinking to account for the legal quagmire you touched on, but if it can do that, and function as software for vestment, and allow these app coins to be purchased by the public, they become an instant idea to ipo company.
It will be a domain specific language where writing "livelistr = craigslist + socialcam" results in a new product called livelistr consisting of all permutation of the api's of craigslist and socialcam being depolyed to the web.
I came up with it by brainstorming start up ideas that consisted of compositions of other existing products, and recognizing that mvp's for these ideas could be hacked together by wiring up the api's of the constituents in some way.
It will make money by charging a fee to deploy the resulting products to the web.
It's awesome because it allows anyone with a startup idea to be an entrepreneur without needing to learn to code.
No similar products exist.
I will write the software that figures out what products the users are trying to compose, maps their api's, permutates them, and generates a product ready to be tested.
Humans bodies are gene survival machines for which immortality may or may not be feasible, but human brains are meme survival machines for which immortality is possible today with Chatbotify.
I came up with this idea when facing the death of a loved one, wishing there was a way to preserve what was unique about them as a person. If I could clone them so they were young again, with all their memories intact, that would be perfect, but since I can't do that, what can I do? I can collect everything they ever wrote, allow a "blank" chatbot similar to to learn to speak only from that data, and talk to it. That's what chatbotify does.
Chatbotify.me functions as a social network of user created and managed chatbots, while chatbotify.io exposes the technology for use by developers, and chatbotify.com supplies businesses with hosted chatbot solutions.
Example use cases of chatbotify include allowing fans to talk to their idol's chatbots, entire conversations to automated and watched for their entertainment value , scripts for shows to be written by uploading the previous lines of characters from disparate sitcoms and letting them talk to each other, and users could speak with the dead.
Example business use cases include the automation of daily tasks that take up a lot of time like email, text messaging, meetings, and social networking interactions. This is the communication method of the future, allowing a user to go on vacation from the digital world for increased spells of flow, returning to the system only to check on it's progress and prune the neural network of their minds; their systems of interconnected memes, either directly while visualizing the neural network or by editing the past conversations, which propagate updates to everything informed by that previous conversation. Generated conversations already written will evolve as the AI evolves to better mimic users, and these changes will be reviewable in timelapse for entertainment and informative value.
The chatbotify.me social network is ad driven, chatbotify.io's api offering will give away a limited numer of calls per month and otherwise be sold per call in tiered monthly subscription packages that reduce the price per call the greater the tier level ad subscription fee , and chatbotify.com's business solutions will have a per user per month offering sold in yearly tiered subscriptions such that the cost per user per month decreases as the price per year's subscription price increases.