Even if I was the first to criticize Tron and many of their moves, I share the same vision as you Hive account@eonwarped.

I'm also thinking that witnesses and some big stakeholders made this only for their own defense/benefit and not for the whole ecosystem/community. As one of the first and determined dapp developper on Steem I asked to people to join our forces all together, the result was unfortunately a discussion and a soft fork made behind closed doors without any talk with the rest of the community and the devs. I'm working for the success of Steem since 3 years now and maybe more (Hive account@hightouch67 is my first account), and I learned what happened after reading some witnesses post. Funny...
Does running the chain means that you have all the rights to do what you want and take some big decision that will impact all people there, behind closed doors?

"If they wanted their way, they can do the clean fork themselves too."

That was an option that our witnesses could have chosen to, (let call it SteemClassic) and I would have followed it without any doubt if things were going wrong with Justin, as some people and myself expected. Now I can say that I will never follow a bunch of people who are acting only for their own benefits while adding censorship to our ecosystem when it was no required at all! I have also no doubt that Justin will coax them and fire them as fast as they made this soft fork.

We, are a minority for sure, but we are not the smallest one too, and I'm not the only one to share your point of view I can guarantee that. But for many reason's, it's not so easy to be against that decision (because of politics and/or monetary issues) ;)