Really love the depth of response here Rick, especially as you’ve correctly recognised various aspects of my scenario. Your first point regarding continuing to wring Anvil dry of performance is a good one. I have so far not had time to profile the performance of anything I’m working on, as frankly that isn’t a consideration at this stage. There are major optimisations that can be made purely on the fact that my knowledge of the language and programming in general is constantly evolving (as a self taught coder of maybe 18 months), so the first step for me would be to simply re-approach a lot of prior work and refactor, which realistically is something I have built into the process anyway. The thought on utilising the Anvil staff is great, they are an amazing resource here on this forum and beyond, and of course are massive Python nerds so will certainly better understand how to approach issues.
In terms of front end, we have a web designer/dev on staff currently who I imagine would be having major input on a project such as designing the front end for our apps. I enjoy being a jack of all trades sort of dev, so dipping my toes into the world of fornt-end isn’t an issue. This allows me to make decisions that have flow on effects, I can correctly predict the effect a backend change has on the front end because I know both. As the team expands this will be less of a necessity, but don’t expect to be at that stage for years. I honestly don’t expect front end design to be a major part of our process, which is why I like leaning on Anvil versus producing a full solution from scratch. I probably need to spend some time making a really great looking theme.css or looking at others, perhaps that’s also something the Anvil devs could look at too 