The issues with Charm have absolutely nothing to do with my position on outsourcing. They're two unrelated points that occurred in the same conversation :)

It wasn't the development that was the issue. It was the preview of things to come, running an infrastructure product, and the general inability to hire somebody to just take that over for us entirely. Do not want.

As for "core"… what does "core" mean?

If you are helpless to fix things in your product, even on a stopgap emergency basis, you are going to be in for some miserable times. Unlike writing or design, code is completely impenetrable if you don't know a lot already.