If the nodes were still running after the previous hardforks, they were forked off. Nobody made a new block past the hardfork time. They are all gone, and only listed on witness ranking lists because they have approval votes for them still.

Right so like I said, why are people still voting for them? Are they aware that they are still voting for them? Hopefully this post woke them up and reminded them.

There is not one witness I know of who does not want to upgrade to a reasonably featured HF17. This means no comment pool, for the most part, and abuse mitigation of the 7 day payout.

Which is not the same thing as supporting it in it's current incarnation and that is the point I am trying to get across.

Sure top witnesses got together and decided collectively not to accept this but to accept a subset of HF17 if SteemIt Inc decides to go that route, but I'm not seeing anything from Steemit Inc endorsing that viewpoint. In fact did anyone notice the image @steemitblog used in their post on the subject? It's a dog being trained to stay with a cheeto on it's nose. Does that not tell you anything?

Frankly I like the comment pool and the abuse mitigation thing seems to my mind an edge case that can be worked out at a later date. But my voice as a witness is drown out in the cacaphony because even though I'm spending the same amount of money each month on hardware/software to run a witness, I don't yet have enough stake to be in the top tier and thus doesn't matter and yes you literally just said that.

You're also saying the top witnesses collectively decided they don't like the comment pool. But where's the user's voice in this? The people who are actually impacted by this, the people who use the site and comment?

Frankly I believe that this posting helps witnesses overall, because logically the only way to be a top witness is to support the vision of steem the majority want to see. Right now that's an economic majority, but eventually this will be a simple majority as the distribution smooths out. So why not let people know about these issues?

Now people are aware there was even a process to make a decision like that and that they can vote for witnesses who support(ed) the features they wanted to see.

I'm not wrong here, I'm just in the minority of opinion in terms of our stake weighted voting system.