Thanks for your responses, much appreciated.

Sadly, if we were to actually develop and make these changes and submit a pull request to the Steem codebase - they'd likely be rejected by Steemit Inc. That's the reality we're facing and why we even started talking about a fork.

Hmmm, this would seem to contradict one of the foundational principles of blockchain technology - that the stakeholders have in their interest to do what (they think) is best for the platform. If the community can improve upon the platform, then this would benefit all stakeholders. Steemit, Inc.'s tokens would rise in value. If they prevent the platform from being improved upon by the community, then: 1) the token price wouldn't be going up due to community efforts, so there is lost potential value there; 2) a lot of the community members may get super frustrated and leave, which means the network shrinking and the token's price diminishing.

Why would a large stakeholder on a DPOS chain not do everything they can to improve the platform and help others improve it? They stand to gain the most benefits.

As a sidenote, why would they devote resources to a dev portal if they didn't want others to contribute to development?

Taking a different angle now - if Steemit, Inc. wanted to exit (cash out), they would power down and sell their stake. I imagine the price would crash a little or a lot based on how quickly they sell and on the community's response (it could trigger a massive wave of selling). So I'm not sure what they'll get if they sell. They'll probably get a lot more in return if they sell gradually and do their best to help the community continue the platform's development. This might even increase the price as it could create a lot of excitement about decentralization.

In either case, somehow I can't see a large stakeholder as a malicious actor, even if they wanted a quick exit.

How do you see it?