There are no "hive leaders", hive is a community effort. I'm again and again baffled how users who aren't involved in the governance at all come to see the witnesses as a homogeneous group. I'm here since the beginning, and have been a top 20 witness for the first 2 years or so, and you can believe me when I say that there are a lot of disagreements in this group and a lot of people only talk to each other because they're forced to do so by the voting results.

Regarding the agreement you hoped for, the replies you got made it clear that none of the changes you demanded would happen soon, because 1) some of them would break the system and 2) changes are not decided on by a closed group you could bargain with, but after extensive discussion involving the whole community (as it was happening with faster power downs before the whole j story).
You were pointed to the SPS, and it was repeatedly said that the first thing before anything else has to be stopping the centralization attempts.

It's of course up to you to feel betrayed, but to me that's only because you ignored or at least downplayed the statements you got. There wasn't any solution in sight as you kept demanding the changes you started with and did not respect the reasons those wouldn't be implemented (ever/soon). Nobody asked you to wait for something, you were asked to remove the support for centralization, which you weren't willing to do. Negotiations don't work when you put a gun on one party's head.

So I still stand to what I said before - the final reason for the fork was the deadlock you created. For weeks you gave j even more power than he already had and ignored the hundreds of users (including all big initial investors) who insisted on the dev fund being used as such and not to enrich a single person. You played a power game, and you lost it, because this is not about the power of certain groups but all of the community.

Maybe you will be happy in the end, because when we're all gone you may get what you want from j, he already promised you everything without constraints. Hive will be what Steem could have been without your blackmailing, and we all will see which chain will work out better in the end.