This is part a response to your comment on the upgrade to v1.1.0 (and then a whole lot of other thought that goes beyond your response). I do applaud you in that you have tried to engage with others in a way that is respectful (at least from the comments I have read so far from you - thank you).
On the upgrade to v1.1.0. I want to be honest with you, there was nothing out of the ordinary for that upgrade. Every state breaking upgrade or update can be well… breaking. The issues were mitigated in a team environment with developers, mainly around reaching consensus, the consensus module froze, but a mitigation was figured out, and issues with the wasm library for some validators (which appears from the L1 after report may have played into the consensus issue as well). The upgrade, from a mitigation aspect, was actually the kind of encouraging teamwork that I have not seen in quite a long time. Anyone in the IT field knows what it is to mitigate during planned events where the best planned outcome is not the one that ends up happening (even with your best planning), and anyone in the IT field may walk away with some lessons learned in debriefing, but they would also see it as a successful event (the network is still running).
I would say that the v1.1.0 event had nothing to do with Zaradar explicitly (maybe with the exception of him owning the fulcrum of the team - in his own indirect words). While I have have my own concerns with Zaradar, I think we all knew that when we voted for the Q1 proposal that it was with the understanding that the developers were not all at Superman’s level of expertise for this specific blockchain technology (although far enough to develop, test, and release builds for this blockchain technology stack). In this Jacob has earlier acknowledged that Zaradar does know Golang well (while also disagreeing on security issue(s) that he felt could harm his business). And I will say this, as a developer, Zaradar does understand the system and has done rather extensive study on it (at other times he has benefited from the input of others - even if it did not sound like he recognized it in that manner at the time). My personal concerns were/are mainly around governance concerns, listening (which I can do better at myself), and security model, and one situation with testing on the market module, more than they were about his actual ability as a developer (and by security model I am not necessarily talking about the AllNodes incident - in all honesty there were points he made at times that were fairly correct in my estimation, but were dismissed, at other times I could see points that Jacob or others made as well).
I also know how difficult it is to keep on a Agile sprint continually. I actually favor longer deployment times (or the open understanding that if a goal is not finished in development and testing, that it rolls back into the next sprint/build and take the appropriate time on it, rather than rush, and if it is too much, to break it down further into other tasks or a story). I give it to LuncBurnArmy and the L1 team, they did a lot of work in a short period of time (for those who do not code, what may not look much to others normally goes through multiple rework, debugging, writing an acceptance test plan or in our case a code test or tests, updating the proto documents, review (go back if review shows issues), updating the documentation (which was outside the scope of the project I believe for the Quarter - although it would have been nice to have seen that in there), testing, rework, and then final testing and rework (repeating until done). There is no doubt in my mind that the team as a whole did do the work (and I would think given the amount of work, that had to have included Zaradar - even if he took on other team management tasks). I have checked the number of commits, and they appear to be pretty consistent during the Q1 timeframe and centered mainly in the classic-terra repository. Normally you develop in your own local environment in a separate branch locally and then check-in when you are at a build-able stage, and pull any current code in main that may have been merged (and repeat), and then once everything has been reviewed and tested, then you check-in again, put in your pull request (listing your branch code) and then it is merged into main/master/trunk. Not every build process works exactly like this, but it gives an idea. All that to say, sometimes commits you see in themselves are not necessarily a picture of all the work a developer does (the amount of code touched in a commit is).
The dojo was above and beyond (in other words he did this on his own time). The Terra operator, as nghuyenthevinh2000 worked on it with Zaradar, was turned into the use case of being able to use for testing that easily simulates a mainnet (for testing purposes - in terms of simulating a significant number of network operators/validators beyond what is currently available through testnet). So, that one seems directly a benefit.
The misunderstanding about EK’s side chain, which there was criticism about Zaradar mentioning that he would like to work on with EK as time permits, is one of those moments where I just find myself really wondering if people actually understand what EK was proposing doing for the chain in terms of technological value. I am concerned about AI (machine learning is a sub field of AI), as are some who actually work in the AI field (such as OpenAI’s CEO, and Elon Musk [who has asked for regulations], etc.). It can have some interesting applications, but it can also have a dark side and some scary implications in my estimation (particularly for general and super AI, in opposition to specific AI). But, as a use case, if I look at that alone. EK, if he walked off, could easily spin up a separate chain, with a month’s worth of Angel Investor meetings in IT related networks, and could potentially walk away with enough funding to probably fund his project and put that chain in a situation that could make him a millionaire. However, EK proposed to instead use his idea and experience to help THIS chain (there are other technological application specific use cases that could be used instead of AI as well). EK did not propose a separate chain, but a side-chain. Sidechains are meant to be associated with their main chains, and in this case EK, at least from what I read of his article, meant the side-chain to be used to develop on and test in without affecting the main chain. It was an idea that could help repurpose the chain in a way that does not have all the legal issues that the market module and protocol swaps have (which yes, there are legal issues that surround those). His proposed sidechain also allowed the main chain to continue to research and pursue other applications on it (such as any people who may choose to work on the repeg effort and market module, etc.). From what I understood, EK worked on this in his spare time, actually proposed himself to leave the L1 so he could focus on it, and Zaradar mentioned helping EK (I took that to mean in addition to what he and the L1 team would be paid for to accomplish if the Q2 proposal passed).
Developers are free to work on whatever they want, as long as they finish the work they asked for the grant for.
I just wanted to mention that as well, since I felt the thread, as well as a few others recently, were heading in a direction that was not always an honest picture in my mind (while also highlighting some things that I would have to agree that I have seen as well in certain areas). Constructive criticism, or actual review of Zaradar’s work (sprint1, sprint2, sprint3, sprint4, sprint5, and sprint6), or other honest concerns are good to discuss (and some of them have been mentioned), but I just think we should do that in a way that gives the same level of honesty in terms of fair acknowledgements of achievements as well as constructive criticism, and charity, we would want if it was each of us who was at the center of that review process.
Just a few thoughts for what they are worth…
I hope you all have a great day today 
