I understand the hesitation to believe that this can be successful. But I think a lot of people underestimate the devs and stakeholder interest in running things without a centralized organization pulling the strings and mostly making poor decisions.
I also think people overestimate the success of the current chain once it's left to Justin's control. Without competent devs and users in the community willing to run witness nodes, the chain will be extremely vulnerable to halting, particularly during hard forks. Even with devs that had years of experience on this chain, we were subject to multiple halts of the blockchain when hard forks were implemented. Those people that were able to troubleshoot it and get it operational are now gone.
I'll give you one guess where they'll likely end up. :)
Thanks for the reassurance!
I would be very hopeful that the former devs and other contributors would be onboard with "our" fork; just the fact that they quit Steemit, Inc., as a group, says a lot. I suppose it all fits... Justin acquires yet another blockchain app with no users...