I just remember a big farking kerfluffle when they changed it to 15 minutes; it seems kind of odd that it gets tossed in like a bill in congress that tacks on 20 unrelated things (maybe so people don't notice and get all up in arms?). This HF is tipping the balance of curation rewards (which doesn't effect us minnows very much on the curation end; will bite us on the author end), AND giving bots a better way to earn curation rewards.
I don't pretend to understand the technical side of things, but it all seems like a giant middle finger to anyone who can't buy themselves a whale ranking. The big draw of Steem to us lowly plebs is that you can earn your way up and not have to buy in like Bitcoin, and this is making that harder.
I mean, I'm not going anywhere, and maybe it'll turn out OK somehow, and I'm worrying over nothing. I'm not trying to be all hyperbolic and "Steem is ruined!!1!!11!!!1!" or whatever, it just has that feeling of when the company you work for tells you that they are reorganizing but don't worry, everything is fine, we're a family, and then three months later half the workforce is laid off.
Minnows, and let's face it, unless you can buy in from the get-go, you're going to be a plankton/minnow for a while (I'll be here two years in September), aren't really concerned with the 15 minute game because our curation rewards are pennies. It's spending an awful lot of energy to, what - earn an extra half a penny? Maybe some folks have that kind of dedication, but I doubt most of us do, let alone the real end users, or mass adoption-imagined masses. It's saving us from an effort that would be a waste of time for us to engage in in the first place.
I have hope that SMTs will make things better for us unwashed masses, but I don't have hope about the new split or one minute window. I don't hang out with witnesses and stakeholders; I don't know where they ostensibly have these conversations or if they are public; I am not a cryptographer. I'm just that regular user that got really excited at the possibilities of blockchain once I began to learn about it and has read a couple of books on the subject and reads a little crypto news (which is probably more interest than most of the masses everyone expects to come over some day from other social media). And to me, this feels like being a cog in a corporation - you don't have any real stake (just your ability to pay your rent, which is huge to you, but jack shit to the CEO), you don't have any real voice, the board/CEO/bosses don't care about you at all, you just kind of have to accept whatever gets handed down from on high and make the best of it. And me stating this feeling here is as much an exercise in futility as speaking up during a company-wide meeting: the decisions have already been made, the feelings of the little people might get lip service but that's about it.
So I guess, I don't know, I'm just venting. But I haven't spoken to a single Steem peasant who is happy about HF21 at all. They're all worried about how they're going to pay the rent. Me too.