To fork, or not to fork, it is an inevitable question.

Stinc, et al, is publicly freaking out about a proposal that is as much vaporware as communities and smteee's at this point.
It makes this fella wonder why.

(Edit)
The code submitted in the pull request is valid code, it could perform as advertised.

Now that steemd can run on less exotic machinery, the possibility of a fork increases, but is still mostly pie in the sky for any opposition to stinc control of the code.
Not many people can afford the hardware needed to support a fork.

If @ned is correctly stating that rocksdb is top priority for stinc to develop, then a fork becomes inevitable.
Once steemd runs on pc's why wouldn't I go with the fork that most favors me?
The trick being getting the community to follow.

As it now stands, stinc, et al, has clearly demonstrated their abhorrence of the original design.
I think the lack of community sign ups demonstrates the lack of support their take on the design has given us.

Before proof of brain was intentionally broken with linear rewards we had no problem signing up folks.
Folks were still excited by the promise of being rewarded for blogging.
Now, proof of wallet rules steem.
The only way to get rewarded is to buy some favor from stakeholders, through cash or hoop jumping, if grit and determination isn't paying an author fast enough.

Not many people want more of the same deal they get being wage slaves in a crapitalust world.
In fact, I thought the original purpose of crypto was to smash that paradigm beyond repair, but whatever, I'm a newb to crypto.

Source of base pic

In order for a fork to be effective, 17 of 21 witnesses would have to approve it.
Now, that leaves 4 witnesses to run the old chain until the witness votes change to suit the stake holders.
The new chain gets to promote 4 from the remaining ~100 witnesses to move forward with their fork.
The average stake holder wouldn't notice anything except now having double the amount of coins on double the number of chains.
Not many gonna argue with that.

I would think the new forkers would include whatever antiabuse measures they saw fit to ensure that stake from the old fork doesn't come to the new fork and abuse it, too.
It just makes sense.

Source of base pic

Heads up, forkers.
If you want to exclude stinc, et al's, and/or other's, stake from the equation you need to take a snap shot of the chain before stinc goes opaque, or roll the chain back to a point prior and filter for the newbs.
As long as most folks' stake remains intact the community pushback should be minimal, imo.

The old forkers can go on like nothing changed.
Except the 17 new witnesses that now get paid for what they were doing before for peanuts, and the new possibilities of getting paid on two chains for most of the authors.

Let the market decide, if you ask me.