[ldarby]

I'm a bit confused by this attitude. You want the project to get better, and get better sooner than later.

You could donate, in the hope that donating will make it get better faster (or, depending on the amounts involved, you could get an agreement that they'll use the funds to work on the specific things you care about).

But you won't donate, because they still need orders of magnitude more funding than what you can provide? Well then you're going to be waiting longer. But then, you will donate once they're good enough, which is when they no longer need your extra funding to do the work?

Edit I think I figured it out after thinking about it further.

Let's say they're at e.g. 10% of the way to towards a usable device, and you could afford to donate enough to fund 10% progress. If you donate now, 20% usable is still useless and there's no visible difference in how long until it's 100%, but donating later when they're at 90%, if they ever get there, would "immediately" result in a useable device.