If only an explanation/summary like this was included both in the communications to stakeholders, but also the documentation of the upgrade itself.
I dont want to speak for others, but personally, I know not having this information and transparency has made my experience far more frustrating to have to deal with (particularly given the work required to compile and upgrade systems), generated more mystery surrounding my understanding of the technologies in use currently but more importantly any temporary provisions being released until a broader solution is/can be implemented.
As someone who has been dabbling with boinc for a few years, and made an initial start with gridcoin about a year ago, my first attempts didnt keep me engaged because cryptocurrencies were a foreign concept, and then the patience required to put the code in place and join the blockchain didn't seem like it would be worth the trouble nor did I get a sense of direction to entice me to participate.
In hopes of not coming off too vague in my criticism and experiences, and to try to summarize: It was a few months of nearly daily engagement, often in small 15-30 min/day tasks, from reading up on the developer/github code conversations, forums, steemit, or external blogs/news/youtube/media, that I was starting to feel like I was starting to get a sense of what I missed (before joining the project), the current state of affairs, and somewhat of a vague sense of where things might be heading. The investment in time and effort felt worth the hoops and frustrations of unfamiliar financial/commerce and technology, but highly beneficial and practical in both geeky/code interests, but also real world global market trends and inevitable disruptive technologies.
Some of the temporary solutions being implemented (ie: reporting snafus of projects and inconsistencies in cross-resource reporting (when comparing for example gridcoinstats to dc, etc.) but while this article outlines why it was necessary to implement the temporary magnitude boost, it lacked providing any rationale, explanation (and "in plain english" summary of what it means), which started to make me lose confidence in the competency of those implementing these changes, but more importantly, i was losing confidence in the integrity of the system as a whole because now the apples of yesterday could no longer be compared to oranges of today, let alone the bananas just planted.
These last few upgrades to the wallet were also. a bit more painful than upgrades past because I began keeping two staking wallets intentionally... one with the current version, and a secondary with the upgrades/releases I'd jump to as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, the new releases generally were less successfully in that post compilation and attempts to rejoin the block and staking/mining efforts failed, and I was glad I was then using dual-wallets to feel confident I'd be both maintaining progress, but not losing out from unintentional (user-error included) or network wide issues that are to an extent to be expected as growing pains.
Hope my thoughts arent too vague but make sense to some of you who may have gone through or are going through similar experiences.