When does a crypto currency 'passion project' become a 'used chewing gum' project ? When Mike Hearn leaves Bitcoin or Gavin Wood resigns as DAO curator or 2 or more Core Devs exit a crypto project or face 'An Act of God'?
Core Dev creativity and project management skills become even more important as the crypto coin universe exceeds 700.
Binding terms and conditions in the ICO would ensure that 'KeyDevs' stay with a project for a minimum of 3 to 5 years depending on project scope. Performance Covenants could be written into the ICO. When these are achieved the KeyDevs can exit. This is essentially a matter of governance, but the problem is that the founding team will rarely agree to bind themselves before they have funding in place.
This raises the possibility of some kind of peer-to-peer insurance pool as a back up pay out mechanism if ICO founders abandon their project before key benchmarks are achieved.
Lastly, a reputation penalty could be exacted against KeyDevs which at the extreme would ban them from the ICO community.
On the positive side, super stars like Vitalik are unlikely to take decisions that would kamikaze their reputation but they might be boxed into absurdly risky decisions by other members of their Dev Team acting in a cabal. This is another reason why governance and transparency are so critical in the cyrptocverse.