As I said I'm not holding you against your opinions and from what I'm hearing your concerns are legit for many witnesses and many have played the political game and stayed in power for too long without providing much back to the community. About your other comment, I believe actions and history speak louder about certain witnesses than who they are. We're in this short squeeze of price now where there's a lot of leeway for allowing some witnesses certain positions because not enough big stakeholders care or are active in judging their performances outside of just verifying blocks. I do believe that once things turn around and Steem gets more traction and value many who aren't constantly evolving, adapting and bringing value back to the platform will find themselves in lower positions.

Right now we have this problem though and my personal opinion after everything I've read, watched and taken into account are that this buyer does not care about the community other than getting them onto his ghosttown of a blockchain. Some things have been told to me in confidence that I can't share, you may think that's convenient and I might be using it to bend the truth but there's nothing in it for me to do so. I wouldn't even mind not being in the top20 with my partner that I share the witness with if there's others doing way better things for Steem. I'm someone who thinks the bar of what is done by witnesses should be increased than just producing blocks and maintaining their position by votetrading or other political games. Steem is weird cause it's disincentivized to buy witness votes by sharing rewards with the voters which is something that occurs on EOS and other DPOS blockchains but at the same time some try defending that producing blocks is the only "job" they're supposed to be held accountable for.

Anyway, the crypto community in general is not easy to understand, the majority hate Steem due to past experiences and former people in charge which is sort of understandable. Many are not aware of the positive changes that have occurred here since but one thing you can't deny is the reputation of Justin Sun there. If the crypto community hate him more than Steem itself it should tell you something, even so, I've done a lot of research on the matter and I've concluded that Tron is what I suspected it to be. A bad copy of code in a bad coding language that could very well be a competitor to Steem but they haven't focused on introducing the social aspect to it because they know people would realize then how dead of real users that coin really is. His acquisitions make sense if you think he's trying to buy users and a community, with buying Steemit he could also have the team work on creating something very similar to Steem and have everyone swap over to that sidechain which is hard to argue were not his intentions to begin with.

So my honest opinion is. JS bought Steemit+stake dirt cheap from someone who wanted out and couldn't find enough buyers because of its reputation. He either wanted a quick profit to flip the coins and knew about the promises of the Steemit stake but plays dumb now because the former seller agreed to sign NDA's not mentioning he knew about it but seeing as how cheap he got it it must've been part of the deal. His best case scenario was probably having the Steemit team who now quit build his steem sidechain, have the community swap over and bring all the value from his Steem over there. Now he realized he lost the community and doesn't want to lose the extra stake that came with the deal and wants out as soon as possible. I don't think there was ever a plan for a true partnership to have both blockchains grow side by side even though that's something me and many others would have wanted. It's sad and I wish there would've been someone else interested in buying Steem or getting the deal through instead because there were (Ned mentioned he had talked to blocktrades as well) but we got JS instead and Ned sold us to someone he probably knew didn't give a shit but he got some more money out of it with tainted stake he insists was no promised for anything and only belongs to Steemit to do whatever it wants with after years of bringing in investors who bought Steem and stayed invested because of that stake being used for the future development, marketing (which we never saw any of) and other distribution.