I keep thinking that a good solution would be to increase the number of witnesses that are necessary to make drastic changes to the chain. Of course, I don't know what that magic number would be. The problem is that it's fairly easy for a group of witnesses to bully other witnesses into supporting their fork.
This is what happened on the Steem fork "Whaleshares". The community basically shunned any witness that wouldn't get with the program.
Of course WLS is basically dead at this point. I feel a lot better about Hive though. There are way too many people with a lot invested who want things to succeed. I am one of them!
The more witnesses, the slower the Progress (in terms of new code and also in terms of Blockspeed). Balancing this, isn't an easy task.
That's a fair point. This is a pretty tricky balancing act.