I’m sorry I did not make this clear. By “long needed improvements”, I meant “things we have long known would improve storagenode performance, once we had resources to dedicate”. I did not mean “things that were absolutely required for making the software or the product work”. I think we have certainly allocated resources where required to make the business viable (by definition, because the business is currently viable), even though it would have been nice to get things done sooner.
I don’t speak for the company in any official capacity, but I would think this not so much a case of “hushing up”, and more a case of “it’s not clear what you mean”. If I read the words literally, the answer is yes, of course there is a systematic process for optimization of the storage node code. It is hopefully pretty apparent from the outside that we use Github and Gerrit, which by themselves institute procedures and process for any code changes, whether for the satellite code, storage node code, or any other code. And we of course have procedures beyond that, but it’s not clear why you would want to know those. From your original comment, I think maybe what you’re getting at is “why aren’t you people updating the storage node software more” and the answer to that would be “because we had other things that we felt were more important to the success of the company which needed to be done first”. But maybe that’s also obvious and unhelpful, so I’m left with nothing much to say.