Hi Hive account@reggaemuffin and thank for your interest, I really trust that Teelkee is the killer app for Steem and opens a way for all of us to collaborate and have the wordpress of the blockchain over Steem.
I imagine that all our apps could share the same core, which embed a steemit, and everyone could start by that simple system, while having different plugins and themes (even private ones) to make their custom DApp.

The project can sound difficult for some non technical users, but it's clearly not, it simply ask for a lot of knowledge in this case, about a solid Javascript framework, Steem, IPFS, UI/IX, and back end things to make all of that work. All that we already have :)

• We will run the dApp builder code (and since it will be open source, others can also run it), the app owner does not run anything. We build their dApps with the Teelkee back end and they are hosted on IPFS and are fully decentralized. So understand by this, this is a real DApp builder, we only build static DApps and host them in a decentralized way, but if you prefer to run teelkee to create your app, or to host the created app yourself that is possible for sure.

• The plugin system is planned to work like wordpress. Those can be simple plugin "merged at build" with connection to third part services who are not dApps. No limitation to condenser like apps, we can have a clone of dtube, tokenbb, or fundition without any problem (depending of the plugins). In addition, you will be also able to use a custom domain for your DApp (obviously). All the DApps will offer an authentication system as DrugWars and 3Speak does. But this is also customizable.

• Here is my background : https://www.linkedin.com/in/ayta%C3%A7-ozden-cetinkaya-3686a311a/

For the technical side I will also force heimindanger from dtube and fabien from busy/steemconnect to participate in this project ;) I'm not sure if they have linkedins but I have 200% trust in their abilities.

But don't forget Teelkee is not only a one company project it's all about Steem and his existent/future community, if tomorrow anyone wants to develop tools, plugins, themes to add value to the project they are able to do so, and we can split the budget to different team/devs to go faster than the initial plan. That should have been more be clear in the proposal I guess.

• I don't know what you are asking by research. But for sure I have many stories to tell about this. Being in the IT world since 2007 (professionally) made me discover how much difficult can be to build a project from scratch.

I worked with 1, 5, 20, 100 or 300 persons teams and I had the opportunity to see many fails, and notice that most of the projects are only successful because the companies have spent much more than the initial budget plan and not because they had a good organization or made a good use of their resources.

I had a case where the project was already costing one million euro and the app was not working as the job side planned it (the difference between the app and the expectations were huge :) the functionnalities were missing or not made as planned, the visual was not good, the offline sync with the database was not working, so in all terms it was ****). The project lead was simply not experienced, as 70-80% of the people in the IT world, and the hierarchy, super busy, noticed a bit late their mistake of taking him for that role, 1 year later lol. He thought he was done with the project after reading the specifics, working with the ergonomist and writing all the tasks on TFS.

Few weeks after the start of my contract for that company, with another colleague, we took the decision to change the process (with the agreement of the CTO) and applied SCRUM to this particular project. We have divided all the features and split them to different teams and made them understand why it would be efficient (most of the devs there had 50 year old and even like that they had no problem to work like this).

2 weeks of sprint for each team, a lot of talk with the job side and the final users, a lot of iterations over 10-11 months and so even the hierarchy noticed their mistake, they did not need any lead for that project, only devs who understand how to make a "complex app" and work by step with applying a methodology rather than trying to just code because that feature should be coded, it was in the specifics. Finaly the project was at good state when I left it, and the CEO and the CTO of that big company at this time came by their self to our office to felicitate us for the big progress made in the last months. They were just truely amazed how things could go faster with some organization.

Beside that I can say you also that I saw how a company like Microsoft understood that well and make it so, most of their development are really well organized, with small teams, using SCRUM.

So from all of this experience, I think to have retained the most important, working with agile can be done only in some circumstances, the entire team have to be able to follow the rules, those rules does not need to be strict as they are described on internet when you type AGILE or SCRUM, but rather depending on needs and so the project itself. It's also good for devs, it makes it easier for them to work and give also more satisfaction when a goal is reached.

For teelkee and since it would integrate also some complexity we will work with selected DApps and users with SCRUM, that's also why you see the modularity with the components, and I have the trust that everything what I listed is achievable in the timings, I'm working on the idea of Teelkee for more than a year now beside the other projects.

Again thanks for your interest, and don't hesitate if you have more questions!