Only 17 of the top 20 witnesses need to run a new version for the chain to switch over to it.
The back-up witnesses such as myself do not really make much of a difference in what version we run.
This isn't about thwarting whales at all.. This isn't even about thwarting Justin Sun..
This is literally about keeping the STEEM blockchain from being shut down and rolled into the TRON blockchain.. As Justin Sun stated he was going to do initially. So unless you're down with STEEM being shut down, and being moved to TRON, and being charged transaction fees on all operations such as comments, posts, transfers, etc etc.. This is what had to be done. Does it suck? Fucking rights it does, but with Ned selling us out to someone who wanted to dissolve STEEM as we know it, this was basically the only way to ensure that it wouldn't happen.
ETH classic was to reverse a hack due to shitty coding, our fork is to save the blockchain itself.. Not sure how you can compare the two.
I understand where you're coming from with your statements, but you're looking at it from angles that weren't even considered when we rolled this out.
We're trying to protect STEEM, Not fuck people over. Temporarily forking out one persons access to ensure the rest of us still have STEEM to gather around is what we are doing here.. :/