I think the OP you are investigating here was suggesting that if printing HBD is bad for the economy in one place, it's bad for the economy if it's being printed at all. So, it doesn't really matter if something needs to be changed for it happen, protocol or not.

I think that the tightening of the devs belt was mentioned, but how that should be done wasn't defined or was defined quite badly, causing confusion. I'd say the tightening of the belt is needed. That means that those developing the frontends or source code updates getting DHF money should go into safe/survival mode only taking funds needed to keep the current code running safe, but stop paying extra devs to continue on updates.

Keeping Hive up and running safely is a must and should be funded. Anything beyond that should cease until the market conditions return, so it doesn't affect the economy negatively. That's what healthy businesses do, though usually after it's too late and we are quite late to making those hard choices as well. The problem is that the stake in control isn't willing to make those types of decisions, because it affects them immediately.

That doesn't mean that forward thinking work can't be done. It just means you're not going to get paid for it in real time from the DHF. That shouldn't be a problem, because many of our best projects aren't being funded at all, yet they continue forward. Posting rewards can fill the gap until such time the economy comes back. Not only that, there's been quite a few retroactive salaries approved for work done without pay.

If the devs not getting paid by the DHF want to keep clicking along, they can get paid through the more common method of blogging by posting their intentions and progress more often. Those blogs tend to be rewarded more handsomely than other topics, which means they wouldn't earn as much as they do if they weren't in the positions that they are. To clarify, being a dev putting something useful forward for the community tends to earn you more from the rewards pool and that is funding of some sort. If it falls short or the devs didn't blog much, which is their choice, they can put in for fair funding of the code they created before implementing it in the future or ask for retroactive pay.

I don't see why that should be a problem, because we are all investors and need to do what's best for the chain as a whole and no one loses rewards.

I'm not sure your deep dive has any real meaning for the point others were trying to make. I think your deep dive method though, should be used as an example for others to go through before they post half baked accusations or ideas.