This one thing people will have to wait and see what reality is going to bring, we can speculate and it is fun to do so. If the witnesses do not want to go the direction steemit.inc wants to travel they just do not approve any changes to the code. Nothing will prevent steemit.inc from forking off steem and trying to merge the Tron and Forked Steem block chain, but steem block chain should continue.

I know some people think that steemit.inc developers are the only steem block chain developing team, but there are others. Steempeak has a team of developers, they have some changes they would like to see and from what I read on one of there post they are prepping their proposal and asking for user input on what will be their HF proposal for after the SMT hard fork. So development will not die as some people seem to think.

At the end of the day I think we are all going to just need to wait and see, maybe Monday will bring more light to the subject.