Where does this 80+% number come from, and how representative is it of the community? We can’t just cherry-pick individual metrics or votes that support our particular desires. We need to be inclusive of the whole community.
And as I already said above, I agree that the community is much more than the people who voted on the governance panel (though as @Shawn correctly recalls, the panel was open to anyone who wanted to participate).
Again, where does this 80+% “vote” number come from, and how representative is it of the community?
It’s true that ZcashCo developers did not write code to fork away from ASICs immediately (though it should be noted that anyone else could have chosen to do so, and did not). This was for a solid technical reason: it would have been completely reckless and dangerous to try and deploy that kind of wide-area-effect consensus rule change without any time for research, development, testing, auditing, or quality assurance. There was indeed a section of the community who would have happily installed immediately whatever binary we published, but that section is not the whole community, and it doesn’t take into account any of the rest of the developer ecosystem, libraries etc. that would need updates to be deployed and integrated into however many third parties might be using them. And with Sapling already in full swing (consuming all of our development resources well into late 2018, and there’s still more to do), it turned out to not be feasible to deploy any PoW changes until the Blossom network upgrade in October 2019 (which is when Harmony Mining is proposed for).
If Zcash is to be a mature, mainstream cybercoin, changes need to be made in a responsible manner in order to provide the best assurances of safety, security, and privacy that we can, as well as providing time for the changes to be deployed by the numerous third parties (mining pools, exchanges, wallet devs, app devs, merchants…) involved in the network. The current network upgrade pipeline takes about a year from late-stage research and feature-selection through to on-network activation, and this was informed directly by what we learned (and the pain we went through) while deploying Sprout, Overwinter, and Sapling.