Older posts here indicated that Leap assumes five fingers on each hand. Is that still the case?
Having a missing finger myself (my left index finger), I'm pretty observant about other people who are missing fingers. It's actually fairly common, and quite common even to be missing more than one finger, or portions of one or more fingers.
If you don't support it yet, sooner or later you guys are going to run into accessibility needs that do need you to support it. I'm not sure if you'd need to comply with something as strict as, e.g. the Americans with Disabilities Act, but at the very least you're going to have customers who do need some kind of support. There are going to be people who have mostly, but not entirely, functional hands who would like to use Leap. They won't be able to do so reliably without some kind of facility to say which fingers the Leap should not look for, and perhaps how to map the remaining fingers so the app using the API doesn't have to be clever.
For instance, if I were using such a hypothetically-equipped version of the Leap, I'd want to be able to say in some kind of global control panel that my left middle finger should appear to the app to be my index finger, my ring finger should stand in for both middle and ring, and my pinky should be my pinky. That, or simply let me say, within such global settings for the leap, which finger should be considered "index" for things like selecting, and then just use the hand as-is. But above all, you'd need to let me say I don't have an index finger and have the leap stop trying to match against a pattern that doesn't exist on my hand.
Anyway, this may feel like something you can bodge on later while you get more important stuff done now, but it's something that's probably going to become more and more difficult as time passes and you get more of your API fleshed out and finalized, so (with an obvious personal bias) I'd suggest trying to get at least some basic support in now, rather than later. Heck, just stub it in for now so apps can ask, e.g., what finger to use for selecting, even though for the time being it may return a constant value. Maybe also have the ability to tell an app what fingers are present, and again, for now you could just return a constant value that says all are. I'd really suggest planning ahead for such needs.
Honestly, I really just don't want to be left out, and it doesn't seem from the posts that I've seen that there's much interest in making sure people like me are included. It's bad enough not having as many fingers as everyone else in real life and missing out on stuff. I wish it weren't looking like it's going to translate to virtual life as well.
(Apologies if I've missed some more recent discussions that indicated otherwise.)
Edit: I found some statistics that say there are approximately 30,000 accidental finger amputations in the US per year (weighted more heavily towards kids), and that 1 in 2000 live births occur with one or more fingers missing. Some very rough napkin math says that probably works out to somewhere in the neighborhood of a million people in the USA alone who have missing fingers.
