Or it could be that TikTok is just getting started which it seems it is and selling it off to a US company would just be giving away a lot more potential future profits and close the door completely to operating in the US again.
I don't have any good answers for you re building a community as usually people will only come if there's money. So if you could create some kind of marketplace where customers could ask for things to be built and then devs could build and make some money from it then that might work. But starting a two-sided marketplace is hard ... or so they say.
But I mainly wanted to comment and say I started learning F# recently getting a bit into Elmish and think F# is a pragmatic language and would love to learn more but there is a lack of large F# codebases to learn from. So would be interested in taking a peek at how one would construct a large F# codebase targeting the enterprise if this does ever get released.
The main problem IMO was the Metro UI which while different from other mobile OSes was too different. It was too cold and futuristic. Games on the platform run really slow compared to other mobile platforms. And games are the number one apps that is carrying iOS.
I use WPF at a low level (no framework components beyond Canvas) in pure C# (no icky XAML); which is probably why WinRT/Silverlight are so unappealing. WPF works well for me but eventually I'll have move onto Direct2D and DirectWrite I guess, but I'll have to use a C# wrapper.
The biggest priority for new CEO is to get the two major divisions OS and Devs on the same page instead of bickering and reinventing the UI several times over from other groups. Secondly, he needs to put focus on UI design and usability instead of having engineering lead the way.
There's no trickle down just trickle up. Giving Bezos, Zuckerberg, Benoiff, corporations more money isn't going to create more jobs.
If there's no money for consumers to spend these B2C companies will have less need for B2B software that most of us build.