FWIW (and it is not much), I was involved at a (very) fringe...

FWIW (and it is not much), I was involved at a (very) fringe level with the Pearl consortium that launched the Opal card, and at the time I asked what had caused the previous effort to fail. Mindful that this has been a subject of exstensive litigation, I dont want to place myself or anyone else in the path of a legal problem, the message I got was twofold - complexity and moving goal posts. More complexity and more goal post moving blew the costs out and from there of course comes the recriminations and counterclaims as things go down the gurgler. I will leave you to work out which party was adding complexity and moving goalposts.

I am not 100% sure of the relevance of the connection between OBJ's patented technologies, speculation around an insulin delivery mechanism, the T-Card and other inferences that are being bandied about. Either there are greater minds than mine at work (exceptionally possible), or there is a campaign of obfuscation going on....