I am glad to see that The Steemit Team is not in favor of adding this to the SMT hard fork. Let the SMT hard fork stand alone. Your proposal would also allow time for people to think about what they want and what direction to take the shortened proposal. There is a lot for people to think about on this shortening of time than perhaps people realize.

Right now vested Steem (Steem Power) allows you to do everything, vote, curate, select witnesses. If a short power down cycle with all benefits is allowed there is nothing to prevent an agent of discord to come in with a lot of Steem, power it up, stack the witnesses for hard forks, or self vote, curate and run. So a lot of things need to be thought about in the sense of "how do we prevent???" scenario's.