What do you suppose we should do about that? We have no authority over them. We (witnesses) can block all releases until they shape up, until and unless they decide to vote witnesses out (in contradiction to their previous representations that they wouldn't, but they can still do it) and vote in their own puppets. Or we can engage with them and encourage process improvements. So far we have pursued the latter and made some progress with it.

Let's start with this then.

It would seem to me that perhaps the only real power that the Witnesses actually have is the ability to block all releases until they either do the basic due diligence that the platform requires to really be a flourishing environment or they break the illusion of publicly consensual governance, use the fact that they control the largest stake in the blockchain by orders of magnitude, and vote in their own puppets.

That would require them to shit or get off the pot, as it were. To productively engage with solutions or to take off the mask and actually show the public that all of this is an illusion, a distraction, and always was. Either one of these would be a better situation for us all to be in, not just users but digital app developers, Witnesses, and investors.

You can engage with them and encourage process improvements, but then we have to have conversations like this, where we talk about basic process testing which never happened and that no one ever thought of doing apparently.

If "we're burning down the house slightly slower than we did last time" is an acceptable place for you guys to be falling, then let's say that. It's not for me and it's probably not for a lot of people who believe that the platform could and should actually work like it's been advertised to come but if it's good enough for you guys – let us know. Say it out loud.

Otherwise we just observe that you must think it is, because this is what happened in these the things that you are telling us about what happened. It's hard to get out from straightforward observations and inferences from your own actions.

I am no cryptocultist and more specifically I'm not a Steemian cryptocultist so I'm not just going to give you straightforward, unconsidered positive boosterism. I would like to see better things, I see the potential for better things to exist (which may be simply more optimistic than it deserves, but I'm going with it for now), but obviously there are some serious deficiencies in the processes and understanding of engineering that it takes to continue to develop this blockchain. The last couple of hard forks have been crap and handled poorly and if anything, this was the one which was supposed to avoid that.

You guys really needed a mark in the win column for this and you didn't do it.

So now we are out both delegation and onboarding from major players until an interstitial hard fork goes out.

Now what?