I agreed the name itself wasn't worth much on its own
Um this statement says it all.
We are on a "domaining" forum - the ONLY thing that matters is the value of the DOMAIN.
If you think you can make money the development of these sorts of domains then I HIGHLY recommend you buy hundreds of domains just like this and start developing them. That's called scaling up - and if it works at scale you actually have yourself a BUSINESS, it's just that you won't be in the business of "domaining" you'll be in the business of "development".
Why ask people for their opinion if you are just going to argue with it anyway?
Agreed.
Whilst everyone has a right to their opinion, there is no point in asking other people's opinions if you have no intention of listening to it.
That said, like all investors, domainers make their money not buying based on the opinion of others (get enough opinions in one place and you have a market) rather they make their money by seeing value where the market does not.
Now the way I see it is as a "domain investors" you are basing your investment decisions not on the domains value but rather your ability to develop marginal domains and make money, this is a riskier strategy, but it may well be a winning formula, but you are carrying a lot of risk from a domaining perspective because your domain has next to no value by itself, which means you have no margin for safety, because all your costs will be sunk.
If your strategy had of been applied to the domain freewebhost.COM.au which was also hand regged, you could say, hey I hand regged this domain, but I'm going to try and maximise my return via development, but if that fails the domain itself is still worth $XXX. So there is a margin of safety in this strategy because if the development fails you can still liquidate the domain for a profit.
With all that said, I think you should have a go at it, maybe all the nay sayers are wrong, but I have my doubts about it's ability to scale.
Best of luck.