Daira, it wasn’t your job to evaluate potential future consensus protocol improvements. You were asked to execute on Sapling last year, which you did, very well.
I talked to Nathan (the Company’s CTO) extensively, to the Electric Coin Company’s Technical Advisory Board, and to maybe hundreds of the people whose cooperation would be necessary to make this go through without a chainfork: other companies, investors/hodlers, traders, random users, scientists and engineers who specialize in economics and consensus protocols and mining, miners, etc.
Once I was satisfied that it would have good results that would protect and strengthen the network for all users, and improve the incentive alignment between the new incoming class of alg-B miners and the users/holders, and that the opposition to it probably wouldn’t be enough to cause a chainfork, then I brought it to the engineering team as a candidate Goal for Network Upgrade 2.
The Zcash engineering team is not tasked with helping me evaluate the social, economic, PR, or strategic consequences of different possible consensus protocol features or other strategic decisions. They’re tasked with helping evaluate the technical implications and interactions between different features, and then they’re tasked with execution.