Witnesses should swallow their pride, accept the temporary label of "hackers," and consider a special hardfork to restore exchange liquidity in a specific timeframe only.
Excuse me? Steem should accommodate exchanges that colluded in a centralized hostile takeover attack on itself? LOL! They can deal with their stupid decision. They know the rules when powering up.
That's fine. That's Plan B, as I already explained, but they should begin their power-down right away.
In fact, if you are indeed too prideful to go with Plan A, I recommend making this part of your strategy. Something along the lines of:
"We will not hardfork a special rule, but we will consider changing the power-down to 4 weeks for the whole platform. Even if we don't bother with changing the rules, the exchanges will be fine getting a weekly power-down for 13-weeks. However, if the exchanges begin their power-downs now, this would be seen as an adequate gesture and we'll consider working on the hardfork that has a 4-week power-down."
Or something like that. And please remember to keep your cool when they stop the power-down after this hardfork so they have a chance to restart it again with the new rules. I would hate for you guys to wig out all over again due to something like that.
It's not pride