Max/MSP is this times a million. check it out if you haven't heard of it. cycling74.com it does the exact same things but with more options, complexity, and a more usable interface. It also has visual fx.
Max is very cool - however the biggest issue for me is its lack of support for abstractions. This typically results in an insanely complicated visual program for everything except for the most trivial examples.
One of the core goals for Overtone is to provide the means for musicians to share their ideas through a programming-language-like notation. This means readability and understandability are at least, if not more important, to expressiveness with the language.
Overtone should be easy to grok, not appear to be some cryptic puzzle.
Signal flow approaches like Max/MSP and PureData are awesome and have their own strengths and weaknesses - but certainly they have no more or less 'options' or capacity for complexity than any similarly mature text-based DSP system like SuperCollider or ChucK.
Strictly Max/MSP/Jitter is a much more encompassing environment than SuperCollider and ChucK, which focus on audio. The advantage of Max is that it combines a great control language with audio programming, a great video matrix library and a dataflow OpenGL API. Generally there are many more 3rd party contributions to Max/MSP than any of the other media programming frameworks with the exception of perhaps vvvv (which is video centric).
That said, the nice thing about all of these environments is that they heavily integrate OSC messaging, which allows you to mix and match anything together. People often combine openFrameworks/Cinder and SuperCollider for instance.
I suppose Jitter is a big honking extra option, yeah. :-) I read the original comment as suggesting that SuperCollider was somehow lacking in flexibility compared to Max/MSP, which isn't true. They're all excellent tools with different approaches.
While a reward structure is crucial, I feel there's more to business culture than a proper positive feedback loop. What about attitudes, creativity, fun, competition, and atmosphere?
