After a few hours of heavy reading of every comment and post about the soft fork v0.22.2 that happened last night it is quite clear that this community is not gonna take it. Anymore. Essentially Steem Witnesses ninja forked out ninja mined Steemit stake (70 million Steem) so that the new owner won't be able to Vote with or Move their newly acquired Tokens. This soft fork is reversible and can be canceled once we find out what the true intentions of Justin Sun are.
Unfortunately the implications of this action will be dire for the further development of the chain (if it doesn't come to mutually beneficial agreement with Sun). If Steemit stake continues to be locked, that means the company can't and won't produce new code, aka. there will be no SMT launch. The team that developed all the prior code will be disbanded or moved to Tron Based Steemit Platform.
Steem as it is will continue producing blocks, but without the core dev team, when the splitting part happens there will be old Steem and Tron Based Steem. Tron will want part of the community to come to their version of Steem and will make a Steem Power snapshot which will create two instances of Steem, doubling your tokens, both tokens will naturally be valued diffently and probably the one with more money backing it will be more valuable in the end. Of course the Tron version will do what witnesses did to them and lock their new SP out if two chains becomes a reality.
It will be hard to create blockchain based innovations without the core team on old chain, there will certainly be many other unforseen consequences of such split like willingness of exchanges to run two Steem chains, with less exchanges liquidity dies out, price drops and all that negative snowballing effect happens. The transition would be difficult to say the least.
What a messy situation we're in right now, but I think this will cool down when both parties sit down, talk and make clear plans for going forward.
The most logical outcome would be that there will be no split and Steem continues blocking on partnered with Tron funding the development and marketing, the core Steemit dev team stays and launches SMTs at the time of BTC halvening event, Steem moons.
As always time will tell what will happen.
Boring day on Steem? Never!