The fact is, times have changed, and proposals seeking funding from the DHF deserve a clearer presentation. Not to question the value and merit of this proposal, mind you.

That's fair ! I think I didn't include a cost breakdown due to the fact that it's not a project as much as paying for my salary. So the cost breakdown is literally a one liner.

Right after the last fork and HiveFest, there was talk of creating a single prototype/template for submitting applications to the DHF. It turns out that to date, we haven’t seen it yet

I think overall a lot of those templates that were floating around were never really used because they weren't "enforced" or agreed upon by stakeholders I.E "I won't vote unless you fill this template". And I don't think they ever will unless it's a value plan situation where a council/an individual decides on where to allocate money. On the broader proposal system there's plenty of different voices and no unified voting (which is a good thing)

I am of the opinion that it's better to let people make their case however they think is best and let stakeholders ask followup questions (like you're doing!)

The detailed budget is rather simple and the majority of it is taken by my own salary, all the other costs (hardware, servers etc) are from my pocket:

Monthly:
Claude pro max 20x => 200$
Full time contract work: 55$/hour, 8h / day => 8800$

In terms of cost justification, I'd argue that this is more than a fair hourly rate for a senior software engineer contractor in NA. And the 200$ claude subscription basically pays itself ten times over, I expect this to rise over the year as Anthropic stop subsidizing demand but I'll just shoulder the cost.