Patrick Ben Koetter writes:
I think if we release MM3 without 'a frontend' we will miss people's expectation to get a feature complete MLM - which includes a frontend in most peoples opinion I guess.
I agree on the basis of introspection (which is obviously a statistically biased sample), and pretty clearly the people who are currently posting "will I get feature X if I use Mailman 3" aren't thinking "I don't mind if I lose features Y, Z, and W, too" when they do.
It's possible that there's a vast silent majority who understand the implications of the regular statement that "Mailman 3 will not be a front end, but rather front ends will communicate with Mailman 3 via a RESTful interface". Even if so, I think the "what were they thinking, releasing without a bundled front end!?" crowd is going to be large, and they will leave and will not come back soon. In particular, I doubt we'll get any interest from cPanel et al[1], which to date has been an important way that Mailman gets introduced to people.
Footnotes: [1] They don't strike me as being creative enough to figure out that this means they can write their own proprietary front end.