Thanks for the compliments! We do really care about quality software design and testing, and we're looking to hire folks that share our values: https://tendermint.com/careers
Lots of people are using Tendermint. The biggest users would be Hyperledger Burrow (https://github.com/hyperledger/burrow) and our own Ethermint (https://github.com/tendermint/ethermint). We're also working on an SDK for building apps in Golang (github.com/cosmos/cosmos-sdk) but it won't be ready for another month or two. There are a variety of apps built by members of the community, and ABCI servers in different languages - you can see a somewhat up-to-date list here: https://tendermint.com/ecosystem
Good to have you here. What is your view around private blockchains and smart contracts regarding Hyperledger Fabric vs Ethereum based ones? I mean, in my perspective there is no need to have smart contracts ala Ethereum because in a private blockchain you can simplify the problem to a workflow with states where the parties sign the different transitions and the logic can be outside a VM. Since private blockchains rely on a lot of oracles, those oracles are the weakest link in the security chain and the VM does not add significant security like in a public blockchain.
I think it's still a big experiment and there's a lot to figure out around the right state machines and the right models for computation in these systems. We hope that Cosmos and Tendermint help that experiment along
No, private blockchains can scale better than public blockchains for obvious reasons: they are trustful.
Regarding private blockchains growing to public trustless blockchains, that is not a trivial problem. There are new blockchain models that are being promoted (e.g. IOTA, EOS, NEM) which have not being studied enough by consensus researchers.
Tendermint works great for 4 to 300 validators, and with the Cosmos delegation model, many more stakers can participate. So yes, it's not a trivial problem, but Tendermint is solving it.