Just a clarification on some points:
At no point did I suggest you would hire artists. You are the artist and 3D animator. Nobody would be tweaking pixels except you. What your 1-2 other (not 8) employees would do is the things you hate.
- The Direct3D or OpenGL code
- Collision avoidance
- Physics
- User Interface/Dialog Boxes/Windows/sound management
I saw with my own eyes what you showed me on the Freshwater Aquarium. The artwork was essentially done, although a lot of it was still sitting in Lightwave. The roadblock? The items I listed above. None of these are things that most people "see".
Also, it's worth pointing out that the choice is not between a nice dialog box developed by Jim which is aesthetically pleasing, and the rather boxy dialog boxes created by Prolific. Let's be realistic. Prolific took the Aquarium code and made a new Screen Saver Platform to build other products on. That time would have been better spent actually helping you solve the roadblocks you faced on the Aquarium. Instead, it was mostly about cashing in.
Having personally developed an application in Visual Studio, there is absolutely no reason to use the rectangular buttons and boxes everywhere unless it's a design decision. The 'buttons' in my application were all graphics that I created in Photoshop.
I have also successfully built a very popular website for people who play EverQuest II over the last year. It is now the #1 website people use to lookup their characters. I co-developed it over a span of 8 months with an amazing programmer who worked entirely
pro bono. Sure we had some miscommunications. But the end result is EXACTLY what I had envisioned. I tapped both my engineering/math side and my artistic side to bridge the gap and get it done.
Finally, Kickstarter will accept just about any project, ESPECIALLY something that would normally be funded and released as a consumable (a DVD, a CD, a download). I can list hundreds of examples. People have funded games, TV episodes, computer hardware, accessories, etc.