Please consider coming back to 17.0 with us. I read that blog as "We at Steemit Inc, will not be acting unilaterally, so the HF is delayed until such time as you witnesses can form a quorum".

I think by people backing down on HF 17 due to the message, it hurts the cause here. These changes are absolutely the best thing to happen to steem since launch in my opinion. Also as a side effect we're seeing reduced resource consumption and a more stable node overall.