I totally understand why you would feel that this is too much change at once, and I appreciate you sharing those helpful suggestions. Maybe we should leverage reddit more. That being said, ultimately that's a call for the witnesses. They're the ones who wanted us to code up these changes and they were elected by you. It's their thought processes and discussions that you want insights into. If you don't like how they operate, vote them out.

Hardforks are our only opportunities to make improvements to the protocol and they are extremely disruptive, especially to exchanges. If the Witnesses hardfork too frequently, then we will get delisted from exchanges. I understand why people would prefer that we make smaller more frequent changes to the blockchain, but blockchains just weren't made for that. I don't know of any blockchain that hardforks as frequently as Steem, or has some kind of technology that enables more frequent, less disruptive upgrades. We do have some plans in the pipeline for making hardforks less disruptive to exchanges, which should enable us to spread out changes more, but until then we have to deal with the existing realities. We agreed with your Witnesses that these were important changes, and that we wouldn't get another opportunity to integrate these changes into Steem for a long time, unless we delayed the SMT hardfork.

These are really hard decisions because we are trying to solve really hard problems. We're doing the best we can, and when we look back at the decisions we made, well those were the decisions that lead to you being here, still commenting on this post and still using this blockchain we love. Ultimately, that's what matters. Users come and go, and no one notices everything that is working well. Steem is still far more advanced in many ways than any other blockchain. Resource Credits were an awesome innovation and the free accounts they enable stakeholders to create is still a feature that I believe is unique to Steem.

Part of that is probably our fault because all we're ever talking about are the things we think are broken and need to be fixed. But this blockchain is our legacy and what matters to us is that we can look at ourselves in the mirror and know that we made the right decisions, even if they're really hard, as opposed to taking the easy way out.