Jonathan Rees pointed this out to me too off-list. Just for the record, this isn't contrary but fully in line with what I was saying (or trying to say). Yes, I didn't elaborate that part, assuming, perhaps rather erroneously, that all this goes without saying, but I did mention that one part of this becoming a real solution has to be an institution with an in-scope cyberinfrastructure mandate that going in would make a commitment to sustain the resolver, including working with partners on the above slew of questions. The institution I gave was iDigBio; perhaps for some reason that would not be a good choice, but whether they are or not wasn't my point.

I will add one point to this, though. It seems to me that by continuing to argue that we can't go ahead with building a resolver that works (as far as technical requirements are concerned) before we haven't first fully addressed the institutional and social long-term sustainability commitment problem, we are and have been making this one big hairy problem that we can't make any practical pragmatic headway about, rather than breaking it down into parts, some of which (namely the primarily technical ones) are actually fairly straightforward to solve. As a result, to this day we don't have some solution that even though it's not very sustainable yet, at least proves to everyone how critical it is, and that the community can rally behind. Perhaps that's naïve, but I do think that once there's a solution the community rallies behind, ways to sustain it will be found. 

  -hilmar