I'm refusing to take any pay until we get a reasonable number of 0% delegates and use proposals to figure out how to direct inflation.
My interpretation of what Toast is saying is in part that the "governance" of the DAC isn't working as efficiently as it could be and that can hurt value. For instance, he's been pushing the importance of "proposals" or other stake weighted polling for a while (https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=14043.0). I tend to agree and have argued that good stake polling is pretty crucial.
I think some people were turned off by the "merger" not so much because the idea of a merger was bad but simply because it appeared that Dan had the power to unilaterally change the rules and create more shares. If the same decision was made after a fairly perceived stake weighted poll was conducted the whole thing may have been perceived differently. Same goes for conflating delegates with workers; there is FUD in regards to how easily dilution happens. I've tended to think having a high bar of 50% approval of active shares for dilution would be perceived better even if it took a lot of work to get there, especially because dilution was controversial and not in the original design.
Wasn't that the bread and butter of the "Killer VOTE DAC"? A built in blockchain voting mechanism? Perhaps what was sold to everyone as the "DAC killer" should've been developed first. That way everyone could have immediately seen what was being sold to us through a merger was in fact legit and worth it. Now all we got is a "Crutch DAC" missing one of its legs (DNS) and it's spinal cord (VOTE supposedly).
Actually we wouldn't even need the functionality in VOTE, we have the ability to do stake-vote on chain right now via the delegate slate hack but making it usable was never made a priority.
VOTE and DNS should be understood as killed and the merger should be understood as buying out post-feb28 AGS/PTS holders. This leaves the 30m BTS stake for adam which has effectively been repurposed as a marketing fund. (edit: but that's just my opinion, mind you)
Ask me why proposals keep getting swept under the rug and then interpret my lack of response however you want.