I haven't created my own big OSS project yet (I've only created multiple "useless" projects so far). But I have been the "assistant" (tester? client?) of someone trying to build something big. He sank masses of time into it, trying all kind of things and never being satisfied, even when I told him "this part is good enough, let's move on to some other things we haven't solved yet", he carried on changing things that were already working, never getting to 1.0.
The following is based on one assumption: you are your own (only?) user. If I'm wrong, feel free to ignore the rest of this reply. I personally think that what you need is _users_. Finding users is presumably the least fun bit of the work, if you like coding (like me). But if you have no user, and cannot find any, are you even sure what you do is generally useful? If it is only useful to you, is it really worth all the effort? Possibly, creating some full application which would not exist without your API/framework (and be also impressive) is the best way to publicize your work, and find people interested in it (aka potential users). And if you haven't guessed, I'm saying this because I feel it's one of my biggest problem. Creating an API/framework from scratch is fun, because you have complete creative freedom; something you probably crave for, if you have a boring day-job. But it's also a bit like a drug; you can never get enough (until you brain is burnt-out, as Araq said). It's like, ice-cream; you might love it best, but it doesn't make you full. What you need is a "main course"; if you work on something concrete (and preferably cool), and the API is just a mean to get there, you can eventually reach the "I'm DONE" stage, in a finite amount of time. You can enjoy that satiated feeling for a while, recover your energy, and move on to the next meal. I'll try to put this differently; what would make you more happy? Knowing that you made the perfect API, but you're the only one using it, OR knowing your API is not anywhere as good as you would like, but having a dozen people sending you feature requests regularly?
