@Locoweed
I wonder why you didn't simply drop the weak, newbie "slackers", gather "new blood" to replace them, and keep on truckin. After rinsing and repeating a few times, the "lazy", "half-arsed" newbies would have been weeded out, and you would been left with your small group of dedicated, dependable newbies. There's probably a little taint in every experiment. Just wash out the beakers.

You couldn't have really expected every volunteer to "stick". Some people will join anything at a drop of a hat.
Is it really fair to the newbies that invested their time, stuck with it and got their hands dirty, to let the unmotivated "bad apples" bring the project down. When necessary, a "leader" cuts and removes the cancer from the good healthy tissue, so that the group as a whole prospers. If the project had been spawned by a company, the "weak" members might have been quickly fired and replaced. A project's success as a whole can easily be more important than any of its members.

Teachers are leaders too. In class, when teaching a lesson, do good teachers let a few "bad apples" terminate the lesson completely, or are these few "bad apples" merely "left behind" or "removed" as a disturbance. You had stated that the project was an "experiment", but that implies that its purpose was to "prove" something. It might have proved that some do not want to learn or invest a significant time in that project. It also might have proved something about the "character" of the project's leader. I would rather have thought that the purpose of the project was to teach...to teach those that want to learn and to prove that when those that want to learn, do learn, and work hard together, they can succeed.
Code:

---

tryToTeachAgain:
try {
	teach();
} catch (UnMotivatedStudentException _umse) {
	drop(_umse.getStudent());
	goto tryToTeachAgain;
}

---