Personally, I think Steemit is free to do what they want with the stake they have. Yes, it was a little sketchy to ninja-mine it, but given the options to raise money for a company to do development on Steem, I don't think that it was necessarily a bad decision. If I owned a company, I wouldn't want to be beholden to people that only brought money and nothing else to the table. Another option would be an ICO, which has it's own negatives.

Others have gone over all this before and I can't remember all the pluses and minuses of all the options. I did come to a realization of why they did it though and I can't say I would be too happy, if instead of them, a worse actor ended up being a huge whale due to mining a large percentage of Steem.

I think forking them out is a pretty drastic action and would be very difficult to do. I think the only reason it might even be considered is because they have lost so much faith of the community. It would be a very dangerous thing to do though, since they are the primary developers of the chain currently. We should increase the development outside of Steem before we consider any such action.

Which reminds me of what I thought when you thanked Ned for being more communicative... That's all well and good... He should be more communicative... But Steemit themselves need to be far more communicative when it comes to development. They have taken the role of the primary developers of Steem, yet they just dump massive forks out there with little communication. It would take massive work by the witnesses to review that code on their schedule. Every fork is like the Patriot Act, dumped on Congress during the middle of the night and they are forced to vote on it. I kinda think that witnesses should start just refusing forks until the code is fully reviewed until Steemit starts learning to be more communicative so code can be reviewed and we avoid getting forked in the ass.

If people did decide to fork Steem, I think that would be good in many ways. Sure, it would cause us to lose a lot of people, but they would be forced to take over development of the forked chain and would have to create the documentation, forums, and all the trimmings of open source development projects that Steemit didn't even bother creating. Because of Steemit's role as the primary developers, no one else has really stepped forward to do all the open source community initiatives that are usually done by the development team. They are completely separated from the community at this point, so what exactly is someone supposed to do when they want to help with development other than just doing shit on their own? A fork of Steem could be truly decentralized and actually end up doing far more good for Steem itself, as many changes will likely be adopted into the Steem chain, assuming they are good changes that they would want.

Of course, I think forking Steem because of this is stupid. But I also think that freaking out and withdrawing all your money from the bank because a clown with a plastic gun walked in. I seriously question whoever decided to do that power down.

I think the right answer is what I have been hoping for for...months. We need witnesses to step forward and encourage more open source development of Steem and get Steemit to work with the community on development. AKA work together.

We can't rely on Steemit. It's not healthy. They built this place and should be a primary developer, but just one of many. This place is supposed to be decentralized.

Sorry for talking so much in your comments section. It's kinda my way though. :P Thanks for reading though.