I'm glad to know you've changed your mind about posting here. Do you have plans to remove your witness votes or will you continue to monitor the community and exert influence there?

As for this:

Steem and Bitshares adopt a message based approach. In this case, the blockchain represents a consensus over the order of messages and the state is deterministically derived from these messages.

I've been diving into BitShares / Open Ledger the last few days and learning more about how things work. Pretty amazing stuff, and I'm looking forward to learning more. I'm curious how BitShares will hold up against the Ethereum community which seems to have a lot of attention right now. From your perspective, are these projects similar in scope and if so, why should someone develop on BitShares over Ethereum?