What timeline are you expecting for yourself, and what is your anticipation for JAM?
Correct, but I think you can better call this “truly” not wasted work if you already make a plan to transform the JAVA Polkadot node to be compatible for JAM, and in that sense yes most of the consensus code is re-usable, albeit I would anticipate it will not be super trivial. There’s a JAM prize, basically I am suggesting maybe you should apply for that two to make sure this work is used in the future.