If you truly believe in Mongrel2, start your own company. Don't wait for the company that's going to truly open source it, it won't be the way you want it if it's not your company.
The problem with starting your own company is that you end up owning a company. That means you have to run a company which means you have less time to hack Mongrel2. I totally understand and respect wanting to get hired by a bigger company like the guy who developed Redis did. Basically being able to completely focus on your code without having to hunt for funding or worrying about where your next paycheck is coming from is a much better proposition for most people.
yeah, stop working on Mongrel2 and get a business off the ground. Then maybe possibly one day when it's making money you can work on Mongrel2 again, your way.
There are still some companies left idling along from a group 10 years ago that sold commercial event-driven webservers / reverse-proxies / caches / load-balancers that were much better than Apache, but are heaps of shit compared to the nginx ecosystem.
