If we wanted to wait until everything were perfect we would never get anywhere. Progress is being made and improvements will continue to be made for future releases as noted in the post.

There are three things that the Steem blockchain absolutely needs to happen on a regular basis without fail to be considered functional:

Firstly, it needs to be able to be posted to in order for there to be content to drive the rest of the activity. (Hard fork 21 actually failed this test for quite a while.)

Secondly, it needs to be able to register votes in order to drive the distribution of tokens around content which is posted to the blockchain.

Thirdly, and arguably more important than the first two in some ways, is the ability to have new accounts created on a regular basis so that more people can become involved in both creation and "curation" on the blockchain. Without new accounts being created there is, effectively, no blockchain – especially with the rate at which user interaction is shrinking month over month.

Any testing regimen that does not involve testing these three things first and foremost, right out of the gate, is not a testing regimen for the Steem blockchain. It's a lie and it's a joke, but it's not a testing regimen.

You may think this is overly harsh and phrased too aggressively, but let me tell you that I am deliberately turning it down a couple of notches over what I really think. When I say this is a massive, massive failure that reflects a complete disconnect between what the Witnesses should have been doing and what they were actually doing, I'm being kind and grandfatherly.

You literally have three jobs. Make sure the content can continue coming in. Make sure the content can be voted on. And make sure there are new people coming in to help drive the platform. Everything else is secondary at best and way down the line at worst.

I'm not saying to wait until everything is perfect, though with the amount of obsessive crypto cultists hanging out on Steemit, that might be a good plan considering that I've heard people saying that the Steem blockchain is the salvation of mankind, but I am saying that if I were employing you, and this were my business, you would be out on your ass. No if's, and's, or but's.

But I am a tiny stakeholder and ultimately meaningless in a world where proof-of-stake is the only major differentiator that matters a damn. It doesn't matter what I write, it doesn't matter what I do, it doesn't matter what I vote for, it doesn't matter how eloquent I am – I simply don't matter. And since that's the case, I have an amazing ability to speak freely and not care.

I want to be really clear, this is not personal. You seem to be a perfectly reasonable human being who is extremely devoted to what you're doing. I respect that. As far as it goes, and as much as I respect anybody who's doing this, I respect you – but that doesn't have anything to do with the job that I see having been done on hard fork 21 and now hard fork 22.

I would expect someone to fall on their swords for this sort of thing out in the real business world. Someone would lose their job. Not being able to onboard users for even an hour, much less a day, is a death sentence. It's a social media platform first and foremost, and while onboarding has been outsourced to some tiny degree, the numbers don't lie. All of this delegation mechanical breakage is an active detriment.

Again, it's not personal. It's purely professional. Which is more than I can say about how the last couple of hard fork sudden pursued, and someone needs to say it openly.

So I'm doing so.