Hi, @ned, I don't know if you're reading these or not, a lot of people have some pretty hostile responses here and while I feel them I couldn't blame you for feeling like this was going nowhere. However, I have a suggestion for addressing some of these issues, and I hope you'll consider it.

Part of the problem here is that witness rewards aren't tied into testing, code review, and so on. And I believe that they shouldn't be - there are different skillsets required for being a good dev and a good witness. But that means that sufficient testing of the hardforks is unrewarded, which is why no one was doing it.

I propose that we set up a Utopian-like system, supported with SP from Steemit Inc. and the top witnesses, specifically for Steem blockchain development. New code, code review, unit testing, bug reports, testnet experiences, and so on could all be done publicly through posts and rewarded through votes, so that instead of every witness having to do a private review of code that is scattered through github, there would be a reviewable public record of the testing that was being done, and more importantly, everyone could contribute to it. This would provide the incentive for more extensive testing that the current system is lacking without putting additional burden on witnesses, or requiring that any dev who wants to be compensated for that work also run a witness.

This would provide the witnesses with a collection of data they could more easily review, and expertise from a larger group of people reviewing the actual code and supplying their expertise, before making their decision to accept an update. It would also put their information-state on a par with the rest of the community's, so we would not be assuming that the job was being done in the background.