hi dan,
with "cargo" i meant the sold BTS in secret for month.
It is true that many people can take over, but do you really believe that when Vitalik would leave ETH it will not hurth the market and the potential of ETH? People would look into his new "baby" and would ETH leave behind, because they would suspect it will be much better then ETH.
In my eyes the core founder leaving BTS activly behind is just killing for 1 year at least.
It's true that BM sold off some significant portion of his BTS holdings prior to formally announcing his departure to Steemit, but I guess it's been obvious for some time that he was dumping shares (with BitShares being so transparent, moves by whales are usually noticed within hours and BM's accounts were closely watched).
I'm sure BM leaving BTS development to work on Steemit hurt its value in two ways: 1) he hasn't been contributing to BitShares as much for a long while and 2) now that it's formally announced that he's actively working on another project, people can't kid themselves that he's working on BitShares still despite the lack of commits from him.
Despite that, I haven't seen a huge drop in BTS price, mainly because I think many people had already factored this in to some extent and also because some people saw disadvantages to BM's strong control of BitShares development. Now that there's no one that can really dominate the future of BitShares or make huge changes in the rules with limited consent from the community, it's a much more predictable platform to build on.
I don't think it's likely to see people leaving BTS for STEEM, mainly because they are two very different projects. I'm involved in steem, but for entirely different reasons than I'm involved in BitShares, so there's no reason to leave one for the other. I'm more involved with BitShares than ever, as I think we're making solid steps towards what BitShares needs to be and I'll use steemit where I can to promote that. I can also say that nearly all the BTSers involved in steemit are still also very involved in BTS (I know of one exception, but he had left BTS before steemit was ever announced).