Is there a consensus among Steem witnesses as to if they would go the ethereum classic route or the current edited ethereum route? Is there any instance of a huge wallet being compromised or updated historically? Just looking to see what's on record.... These questions should be a bit more obviously answered for posterity..
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The 'dan' and 'ned' accounts were compromised by their own carelessness (not any sort of bug in the blockchain code) at a time when they were rather large (millions of STEEM), but not so large as to threaten the integrity of the blockchain to the extent that the steemit account does.
In response Steemit pushed through a fork (unilaterally using the 'steemit' account to replace all witnesses) which reset keys (i.e. taking over control of the accounts themselves) on a wide swath of accounts include those, and likely including a number of accounts which were not compromised. I barely avoided having my (non-compromised) accounts taken from me by a margin of a few hours difference in when I changed their keys.
Some will argue this was all done for community benefit because the 'ned' and 'dan' accounts were not the only ones compromised. I am severely skeptical of this point of view. In my opinion there is nearly no chance whatsoever that Steemit would have unilaterally pushed through a fork to rescue a bunch of accounts other than their own. It is possible witnesses may or may not have done so after considering the tradeoffs.
Oh wow. OK, was this during or around the same time as the cryptotalk forums or whatever they call themselves? Or after?
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A few months later than the original launch which mostly happened on the bitcointalk forum. Of course the bitcointalk forum still exists to this day but the Steem threads are not very active.
It is hard fork 9 to do this which was unilaterally pushed through by steemit voting out all other witnesses, and all of this is recorded on the blockchain.
It is up to individual witnesses to express their views on these types of things. I am not really in a position to speak for the "group".
There is a long while back. If you search through historical information on past hardforks, you will probably find it.