Following your allegory, @shadowspub, it is as if the top 20 witnesses have allowed a potentially dangerous deranged person to ramble around the community for 4 years and then have only chosen to lock them up when the witnesses are being threatened directly.
There was a profound change in the 'deranged person' which shifted him from a mild concern to a grave concern due to a personality change.
While you can see the action being in response to a threat to the witnesses but that is a bit like saying a cop will only lock up a suspect if the cop is being directly threatened. Neither statement is true. The action was taken to secure the chain so it remains in the hands of the community and the governance of our choice.
The pause created by the SF will allow for full communication and learning if both parties are on the same page or not. While I hold concerns about the precedent created by the SF, the stake involved comes with a lot of baggage and promises made about said stake. We don't even know if the seller passed that information on to the buyer or chose to leave the buyer in the dark.
It is the witnesses which are under threat of being redundant. You can try to put your degrees of deranged on things yet this problem should have been dealt with long ago if the overall community were the true concern. It was a weakness built into the creation of the project (Ninja stake) and no one would stand up against it due to self interests. Now that those self interests are at stake we are seeing a knee jerk reaction which violated the trust of the chain.
What will be different on March 6th? Nothing. A majority stake holder can still threaten the chain. This is a stress test to evolve DPoS against such threats and we are failing miserably in my opinion.
you are right it should have been done when it was first coded into HF 14... hindsight is always 20/20. The witnesses gave Ned the benefit of the doubt that he'd keep his promises and the didn't trigger the code.
You're wrong about it being their self-interest or that it has violated the trust of the chain.
The group of witnesses and stakeholders who came together to make the decision was pretty much unprecedented on this chain. They are continuing to work together to come up with solutions to mitigate the issue in the future so this doesn't happen again. Those solutions will likely require a hardfork not a softfork. This was an issue I very clearly asked questions about at the Community Discussion held in The Ramble last Tuesday.
IT was a two hour discussion about the softfork.
March 6th and it's earlier meeting on March 4th will be steps towards building some bridges and understanding. No solutions are promised that day including lifting the SF. It's going to be a process not a one and done event.