please just make the change that prevents any short that is below the median price feed from being matched...
Any reason not to make the change?
Because then the bitasset ecosystem is not truly decentralized. Isn't that what bitassets are all about in the first place? Accurately determining the price of an asset in a completely decentralized manner?
Give the system time to mature. Many people cannot even access their funds and thus the market because of software bugs. It is a broken experiment thus far that was setup for failure. Give time for the bugs to be fixed, market depth and liquidity to increase, THEN judge whether the experiment was successful or not.
The decentralized feed doesn't change the fact that bitUSD is still decentralized and useful and it doesn't defeat the purpose. Giving it more time won't help and will decrease confidence. I'm confident it won't work for reasons that go beyond looking at the price action. I proposed the feeds because I thought we would need a backstop and I don't know why we switched to moving averages or why everyone hates the feed just on principle. There's nothing wrong with using a feed and it doesn't violate any important principles.
There is no such thing as a decentralized feed... the data fed to the "decentralized" feeds are from centralized sources, and there is a smallish group of people that publish the said "decentralized" feeds. There are two weak links in that chain and it is not decentralized... call is pseudo-decentralized if you must, but it is not ideal and not decentralized in the sense of the true meaning of the word.
On top of there being not enough market depth and liquidity, bitUSD has another underlying factor that is stopping it from reaching parity, and changing the way the decentralized exchange functions will not fix it. That underlying issue is that there is simply not much demand for bitUSD. I would venture to say that a deflationary asset (gold/bitcoin?) with the exact same market system as bitUSD would be closer to its actual value, because then people have more of a reason to want to purchase it rather than hold onto their BTSX.
I think we as a community need to get together and organize projects that will increase the utility of bitUSD, because at the moment you can only buy or sell it and nothing else. I think most people in the Bitshares ecosystem are bullish on BitsharesX, so the demand is just not there. We need to get organized, brainstorm about the best use cases for bitUSD, and then raise funds and build those uses for it. I think things like gateways which would allow bitUSD to be spent anywhere Bitcoin is accepted is a good start, perhaps a multi-pool that pays out in bitUSD, things like this will increase the demand and thus keep bitUSD closer to its real life counterpart.
It is not the market system that is broken, the demand is just not there right now. We need to work on that as a community.