I agree that watching this fork is interesting. For many years, bitcoiners have occasionally raised the idea of a PoW change as a last ditch effort to break a large miner attack, but we are now seeing all the complications that come with it.

Choosing the new algo was a mess. They tried to use random data from testnet but that was clearly a poor choice

Now they've got a big mining pool and they expected the miner to selflessly "do the right thing" which in this case was reducing hash rate. If security relies on altruism, you have a big problem.

So now they say they are gonna fire this miner and they have all sorts of plans for changing the rules around when block rewards mature (I believe they are planning on making it 45 days rather than the 100 blocks it currently is).

I have a feeling this is going to end up like cobras faster than they think.

I also think this has some pretty serious implications for our own confidence in a PoW change as a defense against a hostile miner takeover. It might not be as viable as previously considered.