Wow, thank you so much for the kind words! (I'm a Beeminder cofounder.) I'm actually also not sure what you mean about embedded domain-ideas, or I hadn't heard it put that way. Do you mean the domain idea being aligning daily to-dos with long-term goals by use of a commitment contract? And then our clever implementation is how we tie the commitment to datapoints on a graph? That's what we think is clever. But I'd love to hear your take on it (also I'm sure it would be more compelling from a user than a founder :)).
I just meant, that, not only is the premise of commitment contracts well thought through, the smaller choices, like the 1 week delay on changing a goal setting, to why the exponential increase in punishments is closer to tripling than doubling, are all thought through and justified on the blog and have been clearly tweaked over time.
You guys even have super transparency, and iirc mention you provide it because commitment contracts would incentive you to encourage failure, and that's not what you want at all.
The difference between trello and beeminder (to me, at least) is that the beeminder people think about how to provide anti-akratic tools a lot, and embed their thoughts and discoveries into their product. The Trello people basically provide nice CSS for a tool so flexible it has nothing to say at all. If I want digital paper, sure, Trello is nice. If I want _actual help with something_? I'd prefer software developed by people trying to help me.
And really excellent point about queue limiting and kanban! Now I'm wondering if there's a hack or plugin or just a convention to make Trello work that way...
Or maybe the answer is Beeminder's Trello integration, to enforce limits on Trello cards. :)