Hey, @lukestokes.mhth.
Glad you were able to post this, and it's also good to know how you walk through the process of witness decision making.
It would seem to me that a balance could be struck between a massive hard fork and incremental ones, where maybe they happen once every six months, or if that's too long, once a quarter. I've tried to figure out when the first 19 took place, but it seems to me they all happened within a year or so, or at the very least, the majority did. That would seem like a lot of updating to do, although it may have been necessary given how young the blockchain was and how much may have needed to be changed as different issues and situations came up.
Now that so much time went until this hard fork, it would seem to me a happy medium could be struck somewhere in between, so that there's not so many changes to reach consensus on, but not such a need to update all the time.
I've been among the many who haven't been able to do anything on the blockchain, so just commenting here finally feels like an accomplishment. Not sure how many more I'm going to be able to do each day, so I'll need to watch all that while the equilibration (or whatever) continues to take place.
Yeah, I think waiting a year is far too long. Maybe quarterly is a good approach. I don't have direct relationships with exchanges to know what they are willing to accept which, to me, seems like the main limiting factor with required upgrades. Hopefully the modularization of appbase allows us to make changes without exchanges needing to do a full replay or upgrade. We'll see, I guess.
I would hope that what ends up being good for the STEEM blockchain, ie, hard fork or updates of any kind, would not be impeded by exchanges, but that it would be considered a good thing by them too. I don't know. There should be a happy medium between massive hard forks and tiny ones where all are fine with the replaying. If appbase is the answer there, wonderful. There just seems to be one thing that prevents something from happening. Is that one thing that stoic or important, or can it adapt, modify behavior, whatever? I don't know. Honestly looking for solutions and answers that don't end up with ill will and most people locked out of the system, or so limited that they might as well be.