Conversations take longer than 3 seconds.

Exactly. That pretty much sums up the entire purpose of mitigating the risk first and foremost, then informing the community and Steemit Inc's new ownership about the change.

There's really no other way to deal with an issue like this without signaling your intentions first, which then just allows the potential threat enough time to become an actual attack. Not saying that the new ownership would do that, but the security risk is too large to take that chance or to simply dismiss it.

Nobody likes this; but a supermajority of the witnesses did what we asked of them. They used their best judgement in defense of the chain.

That's how most of us view our actions and we are prepared for the consequences from our voters, should they disagree. Personally, I stand by this 100% and would have supported it if the rest of the witnesses had proposed it a couple of years ago.