I guess my concern is mostly that there hasn't been much of a formal announcement with information from devs on reddit or steemit that I have seen.

Devs have been working on the required changes (and additional changes which are heavily detailed in the github branches, wikis, issues, etc) more or less full time, they can't do everything perfect - remember there isn't a centralized company behind Gridcoin but rather it's a decentralized/distributed community effort to develop/maintain/improve the gridcoin network.

Whilst it's true that it'd have been great to have announced the mag stake weight removal ahead of time, the required changes were required in a short time frame due to the network security issues associated with assigning stake weight to magnitude.

The consequential reduced POR payout rate will likely be addressed especially as our network grows (with the removal of the mandatory team req), we just need to research secure alternative methods of prioritizing POR payouts. You can see proposed changes in the github wiki & issues sections, you don't need to be programmer to help brainstorm.

It does seem like there has been an effort from devs to be more transparent about what is happening, but it seems like right now it is typically coming several weeks after the fact.

There is indeed an editing backlog for the Gridcoin community hangouts (I trust you listen to them, at least the beyondbitcoin hangouts?) so you need to attend in order to hear the absolute latest news in person. These hangouts are incredibly transparent, anything not included is likely due to the information being unavailable to us at the time of a hangout.

Despite the backlog, we've not had the opportunity to discuss the ramifications of mag stake weight removal in a hangout yet.

My stance is that network security takes far greater priority than reward payout rate, however further research into secure POR reward prioritization should be explored/brainstormed as a community.

I'm not trying to raise a big stink, just think a little more communication would be beneficial.

We're not perfect & there are many of us, so bear with us as we improve the communication issues that are being highlighted.