Update: that could have been negotiated, you chose to force his hand.

You can't negotiate, if you've got no leverage. Steemit Inc has (and always had) enough stake to vote in their our witnesses (30 accounts on 1 server even) and give everyone a big F. All of this should have been done earlier obviously, enforce it by code so the centralised stake can't be maliciously abused, but people had trust in Ned - mistakenly.

Due to the SF, we've got leverage now. There are always extremists on both sides, but the majority of people who are in favour of the softfork also want this relation between Tron & Steem to be positive.

However, we will not accept for Steem to be eaten up by anybody, as if we were in agar.io. You might call this FUD, I call it realistic risk assessment.