The recent EOS freezing of accounts and the people rallying to complain about it reminded me a lot of what happened when the DAO got hacked and the Ethereum saved the Ether from the hacker. Those same people complained that its not true decentralization if it is possible to save people who lost their coins and thus ETC was created as a side effect.
In a way I see their concern, they might be thinking "okay they did this to save a few investors, but where will it stop?" Will they start doing this more often for other scenarios in the future? This was only about 20k EOS comparted to the hundred thousands of Ether back in the day so it might be that the low amount made an even bigger impact if they decide to freeze the mainnet for that.
Its still a pretty weak point in my opinion, I am sure that if people were able to save all the BTC of investors who lost their coins to Mt. Gox they would have done the same.
It's quite a difficult situation.
I for one am glad how safe my funds seem on Steem as they have excellent ways to recover stolen accounts.
You raise a pretty interesting question here, well said! If people were able to save all the BTC from Mount Gox back in the day, then the trust in BTC would've probably been much higher and the adoption much faster as well, and that would've probably made it much stronger.
Because that came at a time where BTC was much more vulnerable than now.
However, I can't know this for sure as there were many variables in play.
From a purely practical point of view, I don't understand why people get angry if the users are protected, like the ETH example you just mentioned. At the same time, I understand that everyone has different points of views and preferences.
And like you, I'm happy with the account recovery in steemit :) The more secure the users are, the better!