Part of the issue that I didn't explain for me is that it's a distraction (quite unprofitable) from the real focus of my life, of realising dreams of building a secure, peer to peer, failure resistant, resilient protocol for all the things that Steem and other similar efforts are a single provider of with a corporate chain.

I wish the marketing guys the best of luck because the crypto world is full of scuttlebutt that's mostly not just rumours.

As for the promises, they mean nothing, and Dan said clearly in that post I linked in the OP, the are not supposed to be part of what they do anyway. Well, the other issue for me is they threw together a monolithic chain that will be a nightmare to apply the principle of 'separation of concerns', which really means a rewrite from the ground up. So instead of sitting idly by while the vested interests fight against change, diverting development energy away from this, which I consider to be the most important thing - because without this the system is a nightmare of spaghetti-like interdependencies - I am going to focus my energy on doing what I think should have been started at least 5 months ago.

See, I read a pretty strong subtext of dissatisfaction in your comment as well, all those elipsises...

My biggest issue of all is that it's not an open platform. I can't fork it, play with a small test user base, to see the effect, so we are completely dependent on them, and don't you think there is something of a contradiction between the exclusivity in the licence, the corporate registration and that centralisation, and the claimed goals of building a fabric?

They box themselves into a corner with these constraints, and nobody is free to volunteer to help them out, and people who do are shunned or even banned from the Git repository (like they did to @faddat, who by the way was just attempting to improve documentation).

No, we need to start again with the lessons learned, and most importantly, completely open development, no corporate governance, and a focus on the most important thing of all: adoption of the base currency. This last one was messed up from the beginning, with the absurd inflation rate, and 9.5% is still too high, and as I have been banging on for so long: The token matters most. Not the SBD, not the forum. It is impossible to get growth in the value of the currency without taking care of these most fundamental things. Userbase needs a bigger pool to make rewards, there is a definite ratio between the price and the number of users.