That's really cool, drakos!
I remember when I missed one of my first blocks and my failover script didn't disable the witness.
I didn't understand it at first, since the code wasn't buggy or anything. But I found out as well, that steemjs/dsteem didn't support the nullkey.
Hope it gets merged soon!
Quite annoying isn't it! I'm disappointed the devs never bothered to fix it although it's been reported months ago. Perhaps it's low priority given their numerous projects, but it's crucial for witnesses.
Well, it's just a bug in the library which means you can still manage with straight RPC over JSON. One thing that can be done is just not use the library for this task. Also, while it is low priority, it's also low hanging fruit. Unlike documentation, it's super easy to review this. If tests are passing (too bad they aren't), then there should be no problem getting this change in.
Still, there haven't been hardly any merges in a long long time and it's really sad. Point being, I wouldn't hold my breath that this gets approved.
Instead, maybe what people would really want is a PR to steemconnect that does this. That way the feature could be offered as a service instead of witnesses having to implement their own. For example, it would be really cool to see this in @steemchiller's steemworld that allowed you to auth over steemconnect.