Have a look at Good to Great[0]. It's basically breaking down the qualities that make for the best CEO's, and the results are as research based as they could get, and also deliver some interesting conclusions.
Site was put together on a weekend (runs on KirbyCMS + some custom PHP for likes), so any serious add-ons will likely require a re-build.
I can see both being useful though, now that it has ~120 images. I started out with 25, so I really didn't feel like I needed it at the time.
As for the idea, I definitely agree. In my head, it's the design and lack of compromise that make the concept work, so that'd likely carry across well to a different area. Photographers however have 500px (http://500px.com/popular) which I wouldn't set out to beat with a side project :)
As per my other comment, I've considered it, but haven't gone thought with it. My only motivation for the site was to repurpose what I had laying around on my hard drive in hopes it would be useful to people. Also, I wasn't willing to do anything that would sacrifice experience or quality, so I decided not to.
Only thing that I think could work would be approaching android devs directly about ad based sponsorship, because that would allow me to control the relevance and quality of the ads. Decided against it as, honestly, I'm busy with other things and the hassle outweighs any potential revenue I could hope to get out of it.
It's made using Kirby CMS and a custom PHP script for counting the likes (horrible code). The overlay offset effect (visible only on desktop) I've wrapped in a plugin and put on github here: https://github.com/miloszfalinski/jOffset
I know it sort of goes against reason, but I'm tired of sites riddled with ads, so was hesitant in making any sort of move. Only option I'd be considering was approaching good android developers myself in hope for some ad based sponsorship. That way quality wouldn't suffer, I'd get something out of it, and users could find out about actually good apps. Then again, monetizing was never a goal, and I'm slowly running out of nice things to add, so I'll probably keep it as it is.
I have no revenue, but around 12-20k unique visits a month consistently for the past 9 months. The site is http://androidwallpape.rs and main sources of traffic so far have been android blogs and podcasts as well as stumble-upon sites. Initially the link was posted to reddit and it was picked up from there. Of those visits around 40% is new unique visitors, each month.
I would say engaging with communities that might be interested is the most effective way to get good traffic (& feedback) in a lot of sectors.
I have deployed app written in meteor serving an API, and while it's a solid framework already, it still has some issues. Form handling is a bit of a hassle, compared to the rest, because it's still all done manually, and deployment on a custom server, while relatively straightforward, is a bit of a pain, because you end up having to manually reinstall some npm packages every time you update code. None of that are fundamental issues with the design of the framework, though. There's some quirks that aren't yet worked out, because it's a young tool, but it's already extremely powerful.
In short because things move from a state of higher energy to lower energy. Not subduing yourself to gravity would take energy in opposite direction to counteract it (or the geometric slope in this analogy). Newtonian conservation of energy is a pretty good model analogy (although isn't the same thing) and the geometric one is even better. But that's all they are, however accurate - analogies, constructed on the basis of available information and mathematical models.
Outside of that there really isn't a 'reason'. This isn't how physics works, although it's certainly in our nature to create and expect meaning and cause everywhere. Brain is bound to think in hierarchies, because that's how it's built to operate, but the universe doesn't have that limitation.
It was written in 1930's, but in some ways it's still incredibly refreshing and thought provoking.