Thank you for taking the time to reply. There is some information that is news to me here, but it does not change my overall stance.

Let's say we didn't soft fork. Let's say they are terrible, and we decided to do a clean fork. Would the large stakeholders not be dumping their coin and encouraging the adoption of the newer fork, based on your same analysis? The point I was trying to make is that the soft fork just seems to be unnecessary vs alternative scenarios. Am I mistaken here?

I suppose that's actually the crux of what I wanted to say.

I do want to also address the thoughts concerning the stake since we are talking about it too. My perspective is as one that came late to the party, and already impressed with what was already built. I was okay without this promise, because as you say, if they violated it, things would go south pretty quickly. There was no reason for me to believe they would self-sabatoge the value of what they built. The fact that development was slow did reflect negatively on the price as well. In any case, I don't see the difference between this and existing corporate structure and stock investment, with the same implicit contract concerning that funds be used to further develop the company strategy.