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I've said it before and I'll say it again: good technology - even the best technology - won't save you if you alienate your supporters and flake out on most of your goals, promises and commitments.
You've got your point right, even I may understand the reasons pointed to keep ASIC friendly, but the feeling that I was deceived has not yet passed....
I, too, ended up coming around on the reasoning behind sticking with original Cryptonight, but after thinking on it some more I identified a few other potential problems:
* There are no new CN ASICs for sale - after Monero forked all of the ASIC manufacturers scrapped plans to make additional batches. Consequently there is a finite number of ASICs out there that could be used to secure the network, and by all accounts a good fraction of those have simply been turned off (just a couple weeks ago DERO was flirting with 2GH/s - yes, 2000MH/s; now it is <500MH/s).
* That finite number of ASICs will dwindle over time as they begin to fail, and fail they will since the manufacturers typically expect them to be profitable to operate for just a few months at most; ie, reliability and a long lifespan aren't top design priorities.
* Miners like me with a few CPUs/GPUs have to take a more long-term approach to projects if for no other reason than our hardware wouldn't earn very much if we sold what we mined on a daily or weekly basis. For example, I have all of my CN-optimized hardware mining ITNS because their project intends to do something unique (a distributed, peer-to-peer VPN service that you pay for with crypto), but it is almost never the most profitable CN-variant coin to mine.
That said, I still agree that hidden mining via private FPGAs - and even ASICs - is a potentially serious problem, and that forking every few months to head them off is not, perhaps, as practical of a solution as I once thought it was. That doesn't excuse the haphazard way the DERO team decided to stick with CN, nor the hamfisted way it has dealt with those of us who were deeply disappointed at this abrupt change of face.
You know that this tech is literally the best of its kind around, you know what the potential is for Dero, even if they disappointed you with they way they handled things, and it's not like I wasn't disappointed, but I can easily look past it because I use many things and support many things in life that I don't necessary get along with or agree on everything with the people who made it.. At the end of the day, the tech wins, even if you're currently upset about it and some of the earlier supporters are too, the tech and subsequent success will move on with or without you. I think people are making way too big of a deal about this because in reality it doesn't change their lives in any way, and Dero is still the best tech around, and was never meant to be some community coin that the community makes all the decision on.