doc wrote:
If, however, there's evidence of contention (like 130 oppose votes), sane people with strong doubts, and the change is practically hard to revert, then go very very slowly and carefully, discussing all the way and sanity checking. Because speed, or wrong decisions, will simply result in bad feeling, disruption, and time wasted in disputes after-the-fact. QED
This should apply retroactively too. If this feature had been implemented after an ambiguous poll, exactly as it had been, but then after this kerfuffle had arisen in response it had been promptly disabled again pending review I suspect there would have been far less acrimony. The problem IMO is not so much the seemingly arbitrary dev action as it is the seemingly _irreversible_ arbitrary dev action. I have no problem giving devs wide latitude in what they can do as long as I can be reasonably confident that when something screwy happens my "woah, waitaminute!" reaction will actually have some impact.