i believe his departure was a good thing, it meant that @ned can concentrate on building steem and @dan can use his creativity to build better platforms. and it has worked well for both of them. EOS and Bitshares are growing fast while steem is doing well to. it was a win win
Hard to say since I was not here. EOS is definitely a major development and Dan did well in bringing it to life. Would that have happened if he was still messing around with Steemit? Probably not.