I do laud Ocean's intended goal of decentralization. My criticism of it is that they didn't introduce anything novel with DATUM, which functionality-wise is a subset of SV2, which already existed prior to Ocean. The Ocean team "doesn't like Rust" and also demonstrated a lack of understanding of what SV2 even is, which seems to have led them to a path of creating their own version.

I'm skeptical other pools are going to adopt DATUM. Worse, Antpool just announced a new decentralized mining pool solution. Details haven't been shared, but I worried it will be yet-another protocol. Competition is good in general, but in this case, if each pool has their own "protocol for decentralization" it defeats the intended purpose. Instead, it will create even more vendor lock-in as miners would have increased switching costs between pools. Therefore, it is very important for miners to adopt a single protocol standard that has widespread support in the industry.