I'm so very excited to see development coming from outside of Steemit, inc. Well done, Tim! I'm really looking forward to reading about the details of your experience through this process. Though the code changes seem straightforward, I imagine the amount of time and effort that went into figuring out which nobs to tweak (and why) took quite some time.
I was wondering what your thoughts are about someday having a community or foundation owned "official" repo for STEEM? Something I've seen block.one do for EOS that impressed me was require the block producer candidates to figure something out on their own as the official repo. A whole group was formed with a token, voting, and everything to create governance around who can control that repo. Eventually, I'd like to see STEEM move in that direction so we could move forward with some changes without Steemit, inc being concerned about the liability while still being free to take upstream changes from them as needed.
Thanks for putting in the work on this.