Nobody is ignoring it. If people ask this question in a nice way, I’d be willing to give an open answer.
From which interaction did you get the idea we’re blinded by pride?
I’ll be speaking as a community member here and give the exact same answer as prior to being a part of OC. The OC was protecting Grin, but very few community members had a deep protocol knowledge needed to be able to tell this.
I have never had such an experience for my own proposals. People were willing to give me feedback on my ideas out of which many were not appropriate for Grin. I think people used “fork if you want” response only for the times when certain individuals wanted to push for changes and were hyping the community as if the change was a way to improve Grin. This didn’t make them right however. If OC had no spine back then, the protocol design we have would have driven off the cliff.
Some community members entertained this thought, but it was never really true. The OC welcomed my thoughts and helped me a lot writing this rfc. Let me share some things that were never talked about in public. Quickly after I joined the Grin community, I’ve started to extensively interact with some OC members in private by sending them a github gist of an idea which they went through and reviewed. It was my way of learning how things work. This happened over 30 times and never had I not received a response or one that would make me feel like shit. Did we disagree on whether an idea was good? Yes, we did, but in almost all cases I often found myself reflecting back and understanding why they were against it after I gained more understanding of Grin.
The OC and the community actually reacted very poorly. The situation back then was relatively transparent/obvious along with the consequences, but everyone was focused on picking a side and playing a vigilante against OC rather than trying to understand why there were different opinions. Along with that, many were defending the ongoing abuse with the excuse of “we don’t want to censor people”. The two have nothing in common. I’ve tried to explain what was going on and what future awaits if we don’t do something about it in these two comments.
You should know best that making Grin easy to use is a very hard task and thus creating a good product is as well. There clearly was interest in making a good product which the Slatepack RFC proves as well as many proposals that were denied which avoided making Grin mediocre.
A lot of us have invested many hours of our free time on Grin which suggests we care about it. Speaking for myself, there’s no doubt I’d rather see Grin die by failing to gather network effect than us adding features that would end up making the protocol mediocre and thus not stand out.
If people want to talk about this in real time, we can put it on the meeting agenda. The answers won’t be as well thought out because it takes time to describe these situations and thus forum may be more appropriate, but I’d be willing to share my views and experiences.