Continuity of Steemit Inc.
We all want the current stalemate resolved. However, a situation where there is no continuity for Steemit.com and api.steemit.com leaves the ecosystem not much worse off than if the chain was forked. A sister-chain has no obligation to include all accounts/balances - especially those toxic to the community.
DPOS / Constitutional Algorithms.
Regardless of your opinion on the soft-fork, you might agree that Steem's consensus mechanism needs some constitutional change. My thoughts are that the codebase is maturing and our community is diverse. It should be more difficult for a single user to gain a majority and conversely, it should be easier for stakeholders to block forks. This would make wide community engagement much more important in future and that is a good thing.
@Rycharde has outlined an idea for a better DPOS, firstly by limiting the number of witness votes to 8 per account and, in the longer term, having a team investigate a better mechanism. Other's have suggested that fork decisions are made by a supermajority of the top fifty witnesses. I'm open to all such ideas.
Current large stakeholders might not like their power limited, but in exchange, they get more enduring veto powers than before. Additionally, societies where the powerful have agreed to some limits on their power typically flourish. For Steem, that's good for the token price and the community.