First of all - the wasp and doctor example seems like a misfit. I can understandthat there may be different opinions on what party is trying to do a "hostile takeover". To me, it seems more like the situation where one child takes a toy from another child, and the other child tries to "fix" the problem by beating the first child.

I came late to the party and haven't paid attention nor done much fact checking. My initial thought when reading about the aquisition was ... "this could be bad, but I hope it's good". Well, now things have turned sour and it's hard to imagine good outcomes anymore.

I think it's important to stay rational, consider both sides of the story with an objective and neutral mind. I also think it's important that the steemit.com site won't split with the community - never underestimate the network effect, in case of a chain fork, both of the chain partitions will stay significantly weaker than the parent chain - both steemit.com and the Steem community have a lot to lose and not much to win from such a split.

The decision to block transactions (including change of witness votes) for the SteemPower held by SteemIt may have been dubious, and can be seen as a hostile takeover. I can somehow understand that the exchanges got on board if Sun have been telling them a good story; it's both in the interest of the exchanges, the community and the token holders to avoid "hostile takeovers".

Now what was the need to block those funds - did steemit have more than 50% of the stake? Was the Steem "democracy" built upon a gentlemans agreement that SteemIt would never abuse their power? In that case I can fully understand why the other witnesses decided to temporarily block SteemIt from doing what they deemed to be a "hostile takeover".

When some conflict breaks out, it's important to from the very start talk together, try to understand each other and discuss compromises - but the instinct often seems to be to retaliate fast, hard and swiftly, hence escalate the situation. The exchanges seems to have been doing a bad job doing fact checking and community outreach.

• Using tokens deposited by customers to support one part in a conflict, without consoluting the de-jure token owners ... not a good idea.
• Since it takes 13 weeks to fully power down, this also was a very risky move. What if the customers would try to withdraw their tokens? Such a move makes it even more likely, as some disgusted customers would be likely to want to withdraw funds, power up and vote against the exchanges.
• Possibly to keep up with promises given to the exchanges, now the Tron folks are begging for a quickfix allowing the exchanges to power down quickly. Changing the rules of a blockchain just so one party can keep up some promises given to another party ... I have no words for it, that's really a taboo, blockchain technology is not supposed to work like that!
• Perhaps the exchanges didn't understand the concept of locking funds - or perhaps they were promised a quick protocol change to unlock the funds once control of the chain had been regained. I'm not sure what is worse.
• A quick look, and there are like twenty witnesses on the list that are running the new potentially harmful .5-release, none of them have bothered filling out an avatar nor a one-liner ... I did a quick look into one of the witnesses and found no witness information at all. None of the old, regular witnesses runs the .5-release. To me, this is a pretty clear indication that whomever is running the .5-release of the software is trying to perform a hostile takeover.