From what I can deduce (after paying for an account for the better part of a year) is that they've spent more in marketing than they have in developing something on par with the interactive experience you get from CodeSchool, Codecademy, etc. and hiring people that can create legitimate lesson plans and are good at teaching those lessons.
None of these educational sites have hit the nail on the head, but Treehouse's lessons were less-than-engaging on top of making it entirely too easy for me to skip through their them to fake my [badge] credentials if I wanted to.
I'm not knocking Treehouse - apparently they have a good reputation, and I haven't personally tried their product - but I was astounded at the number of employees on their About Us page:
http://teamtreehouse.com/about
From my experience, the courses look extensive, but they only go so in-depth. In taking the Intro to JS, the entire thing was like sitting through a student presentation. There didn't seem to be a transcript or a purpose and myself and the person I was going through it with became frustrated with the lack of QA and quit with the hope that they'd fix it later. The CSS courses seemed more about highlighting CSS3 features rather than teaching how to do it right and what to avoid. Color Theory can't be taught with radio button quizzes. There's a lot to bite off, and they seem to try to fit every lesson into a similar structure, but I don't think that's the best way of going about it.
Will be interesting to see if getting the team all in one location makes the service better, but I'm surprised with the current offerings given, like you said, the amount of people on staff and on the big names on the advisory board. Ryan Carson might have a famous name that can attract these people to begin with, but I can't say that in the paths I went down that it made a difference.
From what I can deduce (after paying for an account for the better part of a year) is that they've spent more in marketing than they have in developing something on par with the interactive experience you get from CodeSchool, Codecademy, etc. and hiring people that can create legitimate lesson plans and are good at teaching those lessons.
None of these educational sites have hit the nail on the head, but Treehouse's lessons were less-than-engaging on top of making it entirely too easy for me to skip through their them to fake my [badge] credentials if I wanted to.