Well Hammer-Lahav calls it "the biggest professional disappointment of my career" on his blog[1] so I guess he's aware of that aspect (more[2]).
The Mozilla Foundation's Persona[3] looks to be further along in terms of code and in terms of other people using it[4], differences with OpenID are partially described here[5]. Regardless of quality I think someone flying solo is going to have a hard time getting ahead of Persona at this point.