Using your arguments, the best course of action would have been to keep running witnesses on the old fork, and convince exchanges that it was the legitimate Steem. Of course, we still would have had to deal with getting those witnesses into the top 20 spots.
Unfortunately it looks like that ship has already sailed. I assume that the exchanges are all in the middle of replaying 23 at the moment since I can't dump my steem right now.
All that being said, the real issue here is that Justin Sun controls all top witness spots with his massive stake. This is a major flaw in the entire system if you ask me, and something that Hive is going to have to figure out how to fix at some point.
And that is exactly what would have happened if we hadn't of forked to Hive yet. HF22 would have become Hive. However, since we already did the work there's obviously no point.
Perhaps we should have just called Hive Steem.
That might have breached intellectual property protections.
Not sure, someone else might chime in here. I thought 'Steemit' was the property. Who decides which chain gets to be called Steem?