I agree with some of what you said here, but I also feel this is a different system then any other social media platform. It's not all about Steemit, INC. It's decentralized, meaning responsibility falls on all the witnesses who voted for this hard fork to also justify their vote and explain the details involved. If we just have programmers and no communicators, it won't go well (and I think that's what you're saying here). Maybe it's time to vote for more witnesses who are paying others to maintain a server, but are also good at community communication.

Beyond that, does Facebook make a large announcement when they change their site? It seems to me every time they make a significant change, people freak out and complain for weeks. I don't expect it to be any different here. Just because financial rewards are involved, does that make it different? Do we deserve those rewards somehow? Again, I agree, communication could have been handled much better here and this issue should have been tested on a testnet or some other system so everyone involved would know exactly how rewards would change and that should have been communicated prior to the code release. Ideally, a work around could have been figured out based on post timestamps to reward existing posts under the old model even if that would have taken another hardfork to fix later. Not sure if that was possible, but I didn't even hear it being discussed.