Casey Aylward from Accel has been mentioned in all void0 company posts. So she must have been very useful for the founder. (I don't have any insider information about void0, I've met her a few times and she is amazing)
I'm biased because I was part of the people that made it happen but yeah, I love React. Before that, I would try everything under the sun to fix the issues I was having doing front-end. But since React came out, I don't have this need anymore. I can just focus on building stuff.
We had the same issue many years ago with the reactiflux community. We ended up moving to discord and that was the best decision ever. Discord has been an extremely welcoming place for all these kind of communities.
Yup, being indistinguishable from native has been the absolute priority for the project. We think we managed to do it for the apps we built but we took shortcuts in the process. The two open source versions of navigator definitely don't meet that promise and it is driving me crazy. We're working on solutions for those but it takes time :)
One realization I had when designing the API of React Native is that if you want to be able to share any component you need to have the lower level primitives to be shared. So I went on making them: View, Text and Image. I also realized that the same layout engine was required so implemented a shared layout which ended up being flexbox.
What amazed me the most during this journey is that most platforms have actually very similar low level building blocks but unfortunately slightly incompatible in many ways.
The 85% number is mind blowing, it turns out that those few building blocks are actually a large part of what it takes to build a high quality mobile app.
We designed React Native to run with any JS engine: jsc, v8, (wk)webview, inside of Chrome/Safari/Firefox, inside of Node, ... We released it with JSC today mostly for convenience: we had JSC setup from iOS and it works. But we're open to ship with a different engine if there are performance benefits.