(cofounder of Wit.ai here) Thanks for your kind words :)
I understand your concerns, here is my take.
X as a service allows you to get X with a lot less efforts.
It allows you to understand the problem and your needs by getting started quickly. Over time, if X as a service saved you enough time and you become successful, you can choose to develop an expertise in X and cut the dependency.
Wit is also about building a community of developers and advancing the state of the art of NLP in apps. Once the bot engine matures a bit, we'll be focusing again on the community aspect of Wit and hopefully advance the field enough so that efforts like the standardization you mentioned are started.
X as a service allows you to get X with a lot less efforts. It allows you to understand the problem and your needs by getting started quickly. Over time, if X as a service saved you enough time and you become successful, you can choose to develop an expertise in X and cut the dependency.
Wit is also about building a community of developers and advancing the state of the art of NLP in apps. Once the bot engine matures a bit, we'll be focusing again on the community aspect of Wit and hopefully advance the field enough so that efforts like the standardization you mentioned are started.