A bit of rationale about why we've decided to go with new Nemo UI and seperate components:

UI is not something that can be done via commitee, well, it can, but the result will not be good. The Sailfish UI has a certain target and is designed by the Jolla chief designer. The only thing they could do was to throw code over the wall. This is not engaging for the community to create anything. It would lead to something like android, where all the community involvement is just cooking ROMs with different set of included apps.

We want to take nemo somewhere else. We don't want to move from a cheap Harmattan clone to a cheap Sailfish clone. It's GUI is a community effort and we want to experiment and do things that a commercial company wouldn't do for fear of general acceptance/market performance.

The hard part is not creating the gui for the apps, it's the logic behind it. Come over and help to create a functional set of core apps on nemo with the new UI set that's being cooked and you'll have the fully open stack you like.

And with the quality work of Jolla supporting our UI I think we'll have the best product possible within the "fully open" world.