Wow, you all are really biting off quite a hell of a project. You've just described some pretty complex game development, as well as the entire financial sub-game and the entire infrastructure for it all and with an eye towards helping programmers get better jobs.

I think I get what you mean by "tech tree", it's a phrase borrowed from real-time strategy games, yeah? Some of your other descriptions sound a little bit like what someone might find on a Steam game. If I hadn't played Sins of a Solar Empire (very occasionally, I don't have much time for it anymore), I think I'd be pretty lost.

Your current terminology is probably fine, it just needs some graphics to go along with it -- a basic chart or something. I bet you've already got such a thing in progress and it'll all make sense on launch.

> How do I explain this succinctly such that I don't turn-off anyone who is less interested in a particular tech tree?

Any chance you can partition your newsletter subscribers into "low level programmers" and "wannabe market hackers"? I think the misunderstanding is that you only talked about stock market concepts to an audience that included people that are only interested in low level programming.