The broken by design thing is something that's always bothered me. I posted a draft of our company's Privacy Policy to github a while back as an experiment.
Having faced the same situation in the past, I encourage you to simply release it. No need to spend months upon months improving the backend while no one is using the damn thing.
How long has the refactor been on your mind? Has it been at least a month or two? Has your mental picture of the rebuild been consistent, or does it change week-to-week?
Here's my advice to get you going: Write down your general refactor plan in detail. Next, create a todo list / timeline that gets you to production deployment as quickly as possible based on your current codebase. Focus on other things a bit. Launch, marketing, etc.
Once this thing has been out in the wild for a bit, reassess that refactoring plan you wrote down and see if it still makes sense based on your application's performance - both as a product, and as a piece of software.
To my way of thinking, this is exactly the kind of stuff that makes mobile computing so exciting: Choice and control.
Imagine when folks are able to be just as discerning when they are shopping for clothes (was this made in a sweat shop? is it american-made?) or grocery shopping (were these chickens treated humanly?).
I have to imagine that Google.com is the most bandwidth optimized page EVER.
Big picture, the W3C spec is not what matters here. What matters is making the same HTML document render exactly across different browsers. So maybe they could drop <html><head> according to W3C, but does that break the document in other browsers?
My guess is that Google doesn't care about the W3C spec in this specific regard. What matters is delivering the smallest document possible that can be rendered by as many browsers as possible.
Something like pingdom is exactly what I was looking for. I'm loosely familiar with such services, but never given one a shot myself - so I really don't know which ones are considered the best.
This reminds me of how celebrities often meet up at the Ivy when they want to attract buzz/speculation about potential projects or simply to make at statement.
Well, I think it's more that the mugtug developers have much more they can do - if that's what the want to do.
Don't say that HTML5 (canvas) has a long way to go. It does - but the basis for your argument is wrong. Don't compare two different projects - with different goals, and in different stages of development - and then say one is weaker based on its current phase of development.